Camps at Our House

The kids and I held our first-ever reading camp at the house this past week.  It was SO much prep work, but so much fun!  I was really nervous about holding it, but it ended up being a great experience for all of us.  We ran the camp Monday through Thursday from 10am-12pm.

We had enough kids to create 2 groups--Pre-readers and Readers.  I put Eulee in with 3 of her friends and we had another 2nd grader to be in the Reader group with Evie.

Elina, Eli and I created centers for all the kids to rotate through every 15 minutes.  We started each day with direct instruction.  I taught the Pre-readers while Elina taught the Readers.

Then they would rotate through outdoor games, indoor games and then come back for some handwriting and word review.

Eli was in charge of outdoor games and he had lots of fun things--phonogram basketball and phonogram trampoline jumping, a sword game, some running games.

 

Elina had indoor review games like phonogram Twister, Memory, and hot potato.  The camp kids had such a great time at all these centers!

What really impressed me was how Elina and Eli were able to adjust their games depending on how the kids did with the games.  If the Pre-readers seemed to be distracted during a game, then Elina or Eli would start making up a story to go along with the game to make it more fun.  They were so good at that!

To make things more fun I also created a Reader's Theater for both groups.  The script for the Pre-readers was very dry and boring, but they absolutely LOVED performing and practicing it.  They loved it so much that they invited their parents to come watch on the last day...to watch the 30 second show!  Ha!  But I have to admit that the Pre-reader's "Cat Birthday" play was pretty cute.  The Readers did an awesome job too!

We gave each child a pre-test and a post-test and the results were awesome.  Most of the Pre-readers learned all the sounds and how to write them in lowercase.  The Readers learned a lot more phonograms and they showed a lot of improvement too.  It was just so amazing for us to see the results!

So besides this reading camp, I also had AM and his mom over in the afternoons to teach the kids and them some cake decorating....borders and flowers.  It was somewhat of a mess, but super fun.  All the kids realized how difficult it is to make perfect flowers!

I was beat during this week...lots of prep, lots to think about...but in the end, it was so much fun with friends!!  I know I'm crazy when it comes to doing fun stuff for the kids, but I have so much fun too!!