As we know many of our activities and learning experiences outside the classroom have been disrupted due to Covid and us learning online for much of the year. However, within the Senior school, we were determined to be able to press ahead with our Prem Community Learning Days (Formerly known as Prem Camps) as it offers so many different valuable learning experiences and fun activities that students can’t always get in the classroom. As we are only just returning to face to face learning we decided that a good compromise was to run two non-residential camp days on February 3rd and 8th and run a 2 day, 1-night camp later in the year when hopefully Covid protocols are a little more relaxed.

The Prem Community Learning Week is set up so each grade has a different theme and these themes will stay the same, so our students get different experiences as they move through the grade levels. Grade 6 focused on ‘Democracy and Leadership’, G7 on ‘Arts and Drama’, G8 on ‘Adventure’ getting them ready for the International Award (IA) in G9, G9 on ‘Service Learning’ and G10 on ‘Environmentalism’. Grade 11 and 12 organised separate days that focused on college counseling, TOK and EE preparation.

The Prem Community Learning Days are an important part of what we do here at Prem, as we value the nature of holistic education, which means ‘Educating the Whole Child’. Academic education in the classroom is, of course, vital but we also believe that having extra learning experiences in Exploria, Sports, Arts, Drama, Music, Service, Outdoor Education and of course our Learning weeks, help our students get a more balanced education. Giving our students these special experiences will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Of course, we are very lucky at Prem to have our sister organisation, Traidhos Learning Community, who have over 20 years of experience delivering camps and programmes for visiting schools. Traidhos staff help create fun and engaging camp programmes for our students, running our camp days with the support of Prem teachers and staff. In addition, we very much hope that the learning experiences on camp will help our students have new social experiences and take back learning techniques into the academic classroom.

In previous years we have held Prem Camps away from campus, spending four nights away from home. However, with Covid and certain restrictions, we are again lucky that so many of these activities can be held on our wonderful campus. One of the grade 6 students said he was exhausted after the day, but that it was so refreshing to get outdoors into nature and have such great experiences. One of our teachers supporting the grade 7 camp said that the students really enjoyed the hands-on nature of the cooking and the drama workshops at Mae Kham Pong.  

We really hope that our students had some great learning experiences and will continue to value Prem’s ethos of sustainable learning in a global world.

Lee Stevens

Director of Student Life