Whew! Our six weeks of summer camp is over and I am on vacation mode for a week before we have some preparation before the school year starts! I’ve had so much fun getting to know amazing kids. Some of them will be in my class next year which I am so excited for. Summer camp sessions were in 2 week increments. Some students were there for the whole 6 weeks while others came for 2 weeks. I did the theme “Travel Agency” twice and “School Cafe” once. The best and difficult part of summer camp is that the curriculum is so flexible and you can be really creative! I thought I would share some of my ideas for other teachers out there or families who want to craft with their kids!

For the Travel Agency theme, we made every kid a passport with different pages where they would color and glue the flag of the country of the day.

It was super cute, the kids loved it and was a great, quick activity for them to do when they first arrived!

When the country of the day was Brazil, we made masks for the Carnival festival parade. The kids used a template to trace and cut out their own masks and decorate them.

This is a super cute mini-poster with the kids, a suitcase with drawings of what they would take and an airplane they colored. They each had two thought bubbles where they wrote where they want to go, who they want to go with, and how they were going to get there (train, plane…etc). During morning circle time I had them present them to their classmates.

During the School Cafe theme week, we looked at coffee beans and then used a grinder.

This is us doing some coffee bean math during circle time. If 1 cup of coffee needs 3 beans, how many does 2 cups need? 3? If there are 15 coffee beans, how many cups of coffee can we make. The kids love this activity and we do many variations based on the theme for multiplication and division. For Travel Agency weeks, we did currency exchange.

Changing rmb to the Australian dollar. Skip counting my factors of a specific number is the name of the game!

We used this map everyday for kids to show us the route by water and plane they would take to get from Shanghai to the country of the day.

For Mexico our morning activity was making guacamole which almost no one had ever had before!

We learned the steps to making guac in morning circle and matched the step to the picture as a game.

For Sweden we made Swedish thumbprint cookies. I modified my family recipe so the dough wouldn’t have to chill.

Teamwork makes the dream work!

Some kids have baked at home, but for others it was their first time and they had a lot of fun! Every time we cooked, we set it up like a cooking show with a table and then seats around the table. Kids would volunteer to come do each step.

For Germany we made pretzels. During morning circle time we used modeling clay to practice the twist. Then during morning activity, we made the dough, rolled it out and everyone got to twist their own pretzel!

The real deal! How cute are the chef outfits we would sometimes use.

This was one of their absolute favorite games!!! They loved flag memory. They played as a class and would take turns coming to flip over two cards to find a match. They had to say the name of the country and by the end of the two weeks they had memorized about 10-13 new countries!

Another game they loved was flag bingo!

For Kenya, we made necklaces. It’s a paper plate that’s been cut out and painted black. They used Q-tips do decorate in different colors to look like beads. The end result was amazing and they all wore them home at the end of the day.

Throughout one week during Travel Agency, I made a massive color by number for them to work on. They had to look at the color key and find what color each number was.

Look how fun it turned out!

For Japan, we made Fish Kites! We rolled up a piece of paper, and had them glue on the fish scales and the tail. This was such a fun art project.

That focus!

They were running (until I made them speed walk) around the classroom having them blow in the “wind.”

For India, they colored Mandalas and did yoga.

For Sweden they made Swedish Christmas crowns. So cute!

Making the crown of leaves before adding the candles!

Here they are doing a worksheet on animals of Africa.

Making their own cafe menus. They drew a picture of an item they sold, the wrote the name and gave it a price.

Throughout the week they made their own travel brochures with a picture and facts they had learned about each country. This day was Italy!

This was a morning circle activity we did about measurements. We guessed how much of each measurement we needed to fill a cup. I then would give them a recipe for them to make.

Such as “1/2 cup of red, 2 tablespoons of blue, and 1 tablespoon of clear water.”

Here they are getting ingredients to making a paper taco. They had a “recipe” saying how much of each they needed.

Gluing the ingredients in!

Believe it or not, that’s only some of the projects and games we did. It was a VERY busy six weeks! Not to mention the English primary preparation class, all their afternoon clubs (dancing, lego, magic) and chinese after school classes of pinyin and math. Oh, also we made videos of them pretending to work at a Travel Agency. It was a whole production!

I had so much fun and am looking forward to a fun trip I just spontaneously planned yesterday before the school year starts.

I mean…how cute are they???

Happy teaching!

-Kaila