<p class="ql-block">This week’s update is here! Check out what your campers have been exploring, creating, and laughing about this week. Let's dive in!</p> Basketball STEM <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;"><b style="font-size:20px;">🔬 Young Engineers Lab </b></p><p class="ql-block">This week, our young engineers explored structures, flight, simple machines, air power, and forces through hands-on engineering challenges!</p> <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;"><b>🏗️ Monday – The Power of Structures</b></p><p class="ql-block">Students investigated how strong structures are designed. They built towers using toothpicks and tested paper bridges by adding coins to see how much weight they could hold. Through testing and redesigning, students discovered how shape, balance, and structure affect strength and stability.</p> <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;"><b>✈️ Tuesday – Flight Engineering</b></p><p class="ql-block">Students became aircraft engineers and tested different airplane designs. They explored how wing shape, balance, and propulsion affect how a plane flies. Students made adjustments to their designs and tested which airplanes could fly farther and more successfully.</p> <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;"><b>⚙️ Wednesday – Simple Machines: Levers & Grabbers</b></p><p class="ql-block">Students learned how simple machines can make work easier, with a special focus on levers. They then designed and built their own mechanical grabbers, experimenting with how levers and pivot points can be used to move and pick up objects.</p> <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;"><b>🎈 Thursday – Air-Powered Cars</b></p><p class="ql-block">Students built cars powered by air from balloons. As the air rushed out of the balloon, it pushed the car forward. Students explored push, motion, friction, and propulsion while testing how different designs affected the car's speed and distance.</p> <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;"><b>💧 Friday – Save the Water Balloon Challenge</b></p><p class="ql-block">Our week ended with an exciting engineering challenge! Students designed protective systems to keep a water balloon from breaking when dropped from a height. They explored the effects of gravity and impact force and used creativity, teamwork, and engineering design to protect their water balloons.</p> <p class="ql-block">It was an exciting week of building, testing, problem-solving, and redesigning! Our students not only learned important STEM concepts, but also practiced thinking like real engineers. 🚀</p> English <p class="ql-block">Younger students:</p><p class="ql-block">-activities that focus on consonant blends and digraphs.</p><p class="ql-block">-practicing penmanship, forming the letters correctly, paying special attention to which letters have ‘tails’ that either go above the line or below the line, letters such as b, d, l, y, p. This has the added benefit of improving their writing skills in general.</p><p class="ql-block">-Mrs. M. reads a story. Children participate in a lively discussion throughout the reading.</p><p class="ql-block">Then children write about the book, paying attention to sentence structure, capitalization, and punctuation, naming the characters and an event or two from the books.</p><p class="ql-block">-practicing syllabication and the use of suffixes.</p><p class="ql-block">-using questions to think about the text.</p><p class="ql-block"> </p><p class="ql-block">Older students:</p><p class="ql-block">-performed two Readers Theatre scripts. Readers Theatre focuses on developing reading fluency, which has four essential components-accuracy, rate, phrasing, and .</p><p class="ql-block">-used non-fiction articles to focus on text features, which are used to help the reader read, comprehend, and recall details of the article or book.</p><p class="ql-block">-making connections between ourselves and what we’ve read, or connections to what we’ve read in other books. For example, reading the non-fiction story of Gander, a brave dog who saved lives of soldiers in WWII, found many of us able to talk about how our relatives were impacted by WWII. One student related his story about a relative who was in the Korean war.</p><p class="ql-block">-Conversations and discussions are essential to developing and improving all aspects of</p><p class="ql-block">Language Arts.</p><p class="ql-block">-using question stems to discuss or write about texts: thinking within the text, beyond the text, and thinking about the text.</p><p class="ql-block"> </p><p class="ql-block">A note about spelling</p><p class="ql-block">Students ask me to spell words for them. In almost all cases I instead help them to use the spelling strategies that we’ve been working on. </p><p class="ql-block"> </p><p class="ql-block">Your children are wonderful to be with!</p> Music <p class="ql-block">This week, students had fun learning through music games, rhythm activities, singing, and hands-on instrument making. They reviewed the musical staff, treble and bass clefs, notes, rhythms, and solfège hand signs. Using cups, they practiced different rhythm patterns along with music.</p><p class="ql-block">Students also practiced breathing, vocal techniques, and pitch, showing steady improvement in their singing. They learned two Chinese children's songs that they enjoyed so much that we often heard them humming throughout the day!</p><p class="ql-block">Students also made and learned to play a pan flute (排箫), practicing patience, careful listening, pitch matching, and proper blowing techniques. It was a joyful week of learning, playing, and making music together! 🎶</p> <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;"><b style="font-size:20px;">音乐椅（Music Chairs）</b></p> <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;"><b style="font-size:20px;">箫（Xiao)</b></p> <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;"><b style="font-size:20px;">节奏（Rhythm)</b></p> <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;"><b style="font-size:20px;">歌曲（Song）</b></p> <p class="ql-block" style="text-align:center;">😄 </p> Activity Centers Recess Friday Fun Volunteers