Little Dragon Summer Camp ‍Newsletter (8/10-8/14)

Pdouble

What a week! We’re thrilled to report that the camp is buzzing with excitement. The weather has been beautiful, and the students have been absolutely fantastic by demonstrating their learning in the Chinese drama class, in English language arts, and in the activity center. Students chosen one of the centers (aviation and craft) on Monday, and then keep learning in the center for a week. Of course, we had a lot of fun interviewing in the learnings. Enjoy 😊

Basketball Chinese Language Arts

This lesson on The Giant's Garden guided students through a moral and emotional exploration of ownership, rights, and generosity, moving beyond simple plot recall to examine why the Giant's legally justified decision to guard his garden ultimately left him isolated and joyless. Through structured debate, students contrasted the hollow outcomes of forced sharing against the transformative power of willing generosity—discovering that true joy emerges not from keeping others out, but from the relationships and "springtime" that arrive when one chooses openness.

Songs

Drama Performances

Group 1

Group 2

Group 3

Group 4

Group 5

Group 6

English Language Arts

Another wonderful week at Little Dragon Camp is ending, and there is only one more week to go. Working with young people is one of the great joys of my life. Here at the camp this includes not only the campers but the volunteer helpers, too.

This week we continue to explore details in fiction and non-fiction texts. We are impressed by the willingness of the children to enthusiastically engage in our activities, and by the progress they are making in their language arts skills.

We follow much the same framework every week, switching out activities and texts, but always working toward the same language arts goals:

As an English Language Arts teachers in the Little Dragon Camp, we guide students in building core communication skills, focusing on reading, writing, and speaking.

Core Teaching Duties

• Instruction: Teaching grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and sentence building.

• Literacy: Guiding students through reading comprehension and text analysis.

• Writing: Helping learners draft and edit essays or stories.

• Speaking: Encouraging verbal practice through group talks and presentations.

Following are many of the activities we engage in:

Readers Theatre focuses on developing reading fluency, which has four essential components-accuracy, rate, phrasing, and .

- using 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

-making connections between ourselves and what we’ve read, or connections to what we’ve read in other books

-engaging in many conversations and discussions, which are essential to developing and improving all aspects of Language Arts, including practicing correct grammar and diction

-using question stems to discuss or write about texts: thinking within the text, beyond the text, and thinking about the text.

-exploring figures of speech

-Reading several fiction and non-fiction texts

-A note about spelling:

Students ask to spell words for them. In almost all cases we instead help them to use the spelling strategies that they’ve been working on. Usually, they are then able to spell the word correctly. It’s a process!

Aviation

This is a course about aviation. The kids were paying attention to the lessons, and they were very engaged and enthusiastic about my activities after the lessons everyday. They learned about the beginnings of aviation, how planes work and the concepts of the physics behind it, how air traffic controllers tell planes where to go, and learned how planes control themselves in the air this week. Each day there was a related activity from making paper airplanes and controlling the direction they go, to simple physics demonstrations of the concepts they learned, and using the phonetic alphabet to decode sentences.

Puzzle Lego Craft Water Fun Sweet Time Volunteers