Spy School

I have just come back from a three week summer holiday in England. As well as catching up with family and friends I spent a week running a "Spy School". Spy School was a spy themed children's holiday organised by the charity ATE. I have been volunteering for ATE for 10 years, since before I went to Japan, and have previously worked on or directed holidays with maths, singing and robotics themes as well and no theme in particular. Earlier in the year ATE asked me if I wanted to direct a spy school. I thought "How many people ever get the opportunity to do something like this?" and agreed. I spent some of my free time in June and July planning and organising and came back to England early August. After a week back at home I went to Moor Park in Ludlow to run Spy School and this is how it went...
There were 24 children on the holiday who turned out to be very nice and on the whole very well behaved. To help me look after them I had an assistant director, 4 monitors (who each had a group of 6 children), a matron, a caterer and 4 general assistants. Each day had different activities.
Day1 included codebreaking and semaphore flag making, Day 2 fingerprinting and disguise making, Day 3 was a day trip to Ludlow castle but the children also had to perform a black market nuclear weapons bust (seriously!), Day 4 blood spatter analysis and a crime scene investigation, Day 5 featured ninja lunch and walkie talkie activites, Day 6 had a graduation ceremony but before that could take place the children had to defuse a time bomb, rescue the ninja and deal justice to some North Korean rappers up to no good.
Throughout the week strange characters came and went and the children became involved with helping a ninja defeat the one armed evil twin of my assistant director who was working for the North Koreans. As I've mentioned already, the children went undercover and bought nuclear weapons to keep them out of dangerous hands. They ate ninja lunch. They uncovered the truth about the evil twin by investigating a crime scene recreation. The graduation ceremony was interupted by a smartie time bomb crisis which was eventually resolved and ended in the evil twin becoming good and the North Korean rappers who had tricked her dealt justice by being thrown into a swimming pool.
It was great fun planning and came together well in the execution. I was lucky that I had a great staff team and everyone really got into the spy activities. As the week has finished all aspects of the spy school are now declassified and I can show you the following pictures.