Yes, we did have IN-PERSON summer camp. We averaged 22 campers from July 6-31, 8am to 1pm, Monday thru Friday.
We followed all CDC, Public Health, and Governor’s directives and after a few days the kids got comfortable with all of them including the wearing of masks.
This year we used a new curriculum from Scholastic called LitCamp. LitCamp’s model integrates 3 areas – Social Emotional Development, Literacy Skills, and Engagement Skills that are employed in a set of lessons that inspire engagement and motivation. LitCamp lessons are framed around these seven key strengths because young people learn best in supportive and positive learning environments. The 7 Strengths: Belonging, Friendship, Kindness, Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Hope. We used this for our K-5 graders and they loved it.
For our 6-8 graders we offered STEM activities which included computer coding as well as Youth Entrepreneur’s “Lemonade Day”. Lemonade Day teaches how to start, own and operate their own business – a lemonade stand. It was a grand success as they made $165 selling each cup for $1.00. It was great to watch it all unfold, especially the day of the actual selling. The kids had so much fun they wanted to sell more so we added an additional day. They paid back the material costs, bought pizza for the whole camp, and then, in an act of corporate philanthropy, donated the remaining balance to the center. Just plain AWESOME!!
