Summer Camp Recap - Last 2 Weeks of July

We have officially finished the first month of summer camp! The last two weeks were Artistic Adventures and S.T.E.A.M.

Artistic Adventures

For Art week we did a lot of painting, colouring, and paper crafts. We have a crazy amount of paint at the centre, so a lot of my planning for this week, centered around using the resources we already had at our disposal. We painted rocks, we painted clay creations that we made the day before, made coffee filter butterflies, we learned to make origami boxes, they made bracelets and necklaces, etc.

If there is one craft I would not repeat it is definitely clay creations. We used air drying clay from the dollar store and it is really a challenging crafts for students still developing their fine motor skills.

They don't quite understand how to blend together the separate pieces so that they clay molds together, so once their creations dried, many of them broke and hot glue could only do so much. I think it's better for older students, maybe middle school and up, or maybe different clay would've been better.

I taught the students how to make an origami box that you need to blow into to inflate, as well as an origami eyeball. One of my students liked it so much that she created more and more of the boxes every day of the camp. She eventually had the process memorized and even got some of the other students doing it daily too.

Regarding the teaching side of the camp, I feel like I'm getting a better hang of teaching elementary aged students in groups bigger than 3 now. I had a few management strategies in place before, but I switched some things around this week and it seems to have helped manage dynamics better.

The summer camp I teach is an educational one, meaning we do fun on-theme activities, but we also have 1 1/2 hour long section for academic work (English and Math) everyday. I teach all the students together and they range from PK - grade 7, so managing the drastic differences, not just in academic work, but in motivation and temperament, can be really challenging at times.

To manage this better though, I made some changes to one aspect of camp, as well as how, what we call 'bin time', is set up.

While lesson planning months back, I thought it would be a fun aspect of camp to have candy draws every Friday. Students earn ballots with the names on it for a chance to win the candy in the jar at the end of the week. Initially, I was just going to give them ballots for every good deed or behaviour throughout camp, but when 'bin time' was getting more and more hectic, I thought we needed a change.

Instead of getting a ballot every time they did something good, they would also get one for every page they completed in their booklets. For some of my students, this really worked to keep them focused and motivated during book work. I found that there were far less complaints about their work, much less chatting with each other to avoid work, and many more questions about their subjects. This is definitely the approach I will have towards 'bin time' going forward with camp.

Regarding seating, in the area of the centre where I teach, there are 3 tables. During the first 2 weeks, I would push 2 tables together and have all students sitting together, with my grading table being the far back one. I found that this encouraged a lot of getting up out of their seats to ask me questions, a lot more talking to one another since everyone was facing each other, and a lot of running back and forth on my end.

This week, I had 6 students, so I made some changes. I separated them into groups of 3 with the centre table being my space for planner marking and grading. Having me more centralized and them in smaller, planned out pairings, helped to manage unwanted behaviours. I could also keep an eye on everyone without having to run around so much, the students still got up, but not across the room, and they chatted less since there were less opportunities to distract each other. This will also be the approach I continue with as camp continues.

S.T.E.A.M Week

The next week was S.T.E.A.M and during this week I had the most students I've had so far with 8. I also had 5 new students, with only 3 repeating from the last 3 weeks. But, during this week is also when I had another co-teacher, a high school teacher who excels in math, chemistry, physics, etc.; the perfect fit for a S.T.E.A.M week.

I planned this week around topics Bill Nye covered in his show Bill Nye the Science Guy from the 90's. Everyday we would watch 2 of his episodes then do experiments related to the topic. For example, we watched the episode on buoyancy, then we had the students put a raw egg in water and slowly add more and more salt to it to see how that changed the buoyancy of the egg due to the density of the water. They seemed to enjoy this one, but I can't say that about the rest of them.

The students didn't seem to enjoy watching the Bill Nye videos given how outdated the editing was and having mixed ages makes it hard as well. Many of the younger students found the videos quite boring. Even though I had planned experiments surrounding the topics, they seemed to just want to paint and do their own activities. I will have to rethink the activities for STEAM week 2 in August.

Part of teaching, of course, is prepping materials. For prep this week, I had to collect empty plastic bottle, wash them, remove the label, and cut them using an exacto knife. For the first week, I had to collect carboard and cut out Minecraft pickaxes using a template from last summer.

It is typically in these moments when I'm prepping non-academic materials when I feel the most that I have a unique job. The job of a teacher is so diverse in tasks, especially when you teach K-12.

I would say, out of all these weeks so far, this one has put me out of my element the most. I felt so much imposer syndrome when I was teaching the science. On day one, the first experiments we did went by faster than I expected and the 3rd one we did, making slime, was a crazy mess and somewhat of a fail. It was definitely a huge learning curve for me and solidified for me even more so that I'm a language teacher through and through.

To end on a positive note however, we did have a water day that started out with the students learning about the water cycle and ended with a water balloon fight.

They really enjoyed this day thankfully.

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The next 2 weeks are food science and Lego week 2. Both should go by smoother and with more enjoyment from the students and myself.