Planning your summer? Check out our weekly camp calendar for June, July and August 2019!

Registration forms can be downloaded in PDF and Word formats.

Scroll down to see all weekly topic descriptions.

Week 1: June 24 – June 28

DELIGHTFUL LADYBUGS!

As this first camp session takes advantage of childhood delight with ladybugs, AcadeCampers manipulate key science and math concepts, including basic information relating to animal form and ecology. In a series of observational and role-play activities, campers learn about ladybug body structure, life cycle, defensive behavior, and favorite foods. Campers absorb the mathematical concepts of counting, symmetry, and pattern as they indulge their curiosity about this charming insect.  Accordingly, campers learn important lessons about the environmental role of ladybugs and the interdependence found in nature.  Friday afternoon is a presentation of the play they have written cooperatively based on the literature reviewed during the week.

Week 2: July 2-5

ANT HOMES UNDER THE GROUND

This week’s session brings AcadeCampers down to ground-level with this ubiquitous insect, introducing them to ant behavior using role-play, cooperative exercises, and up-close observation. In multilayered activities, campers learn about the insects’ body structure, “jobs,” and homes by observing ants in nature and in an ant farm. They role-play ants following a scent trail and dragging food through a tunnel-like structure. A large Ant Nest is assembled in stages to highlight ant-colony tunnels, food, social structure, and life cycle as each of these elements is introduced. The Friday afternoon culminating cooperative logic game called “Fill the Hill” uses stimulating mathematical and cooperative skills to round up knowledge the campers have gained.

Week 3: July 8-12

MATH AROUND THE WORLD

Through a compelling week of math play, AcadeCampers discover that games and diversions from across the globe and throughout time have relied on numbers, geometry, probability, and logic. Campers have fun learning about the different ways people around the world measure, count, and use patterns and symmetry in their everyday lives. Maps are used and historical connections are made.  Campers play games such as Game Sticks by Native Californians, Achi from Ghana and the forbidden game of Jirig from Mongolia. They solve Lo-Shu puzzles, classic magic squares from China.   They build with Architek from Quebec, Canada.  Also included are imaginative board games like Lambs and Tigers from India and the Little Goat Game from Sudan, or bead and string puzzles from China, and Möbius strip puzzles from Germany. On Friday afternoon, AcadeCampers get to play with their favorite math games.

Week 4: July 15 – July 19

GROUP SOLUTIONS

This camp session brings cooperative learning to the forefront in highly motivating ways, providing AcadeCampers with early and valuable experience in working and solving problems together. They participate in 50 or more highly involving cooperative puzzles in logic, including the ones from Défi mathématique.  Each camper receives a clue to a problem and must share the information with all other group members to find the solution. The entire group is responsible for resolving the problem, and the solution can only be discovered by amassing and connecting all the clues. Math scavenger hunt on Friday afternoon.

Week 5: July 22-26

HIDE A BUTTERFLY

AcadeCampers use metaphoric wide-angle lens, creating and populating a mural meadow in which paper animals will gradually tell the stories of camouflage, predator/prey, and survival behavior in the real outdoors.  Making camouflaged butterflies, hungry birds, and a meadow of flowers to enact The Butterfly Play, students learn several basic concepts—about protective coloration, parts of a flower, and strategies employed by both hunters and the hunted in a real meadow.  They witness the wonder of the butterfly life cycle in child-and-insect friendly habitats. They see the caterpillar’s transition as it grows, changes into a chrysalis, and finally emerges as a butterfly to then be released outside. There is ample opportunity for students to talk about small animals they’ve seen in real grass-and-flower environments. Butterflies release in three Fridays from this one.

Week 6: July 29 to August 2

BUZZING A HIVE

During this extensive and fascinating session, AcadeCampers get a good introduction to the honeybee’s extravagant communication system and intricate behavior, and an appreciation for our interdependence with these and all insects. In guided-discovery activities that build on one another, campers make paper bees to learn about bee body structure; act as bees in a beehive drama, taking the parts of guard bees and other role-players in the hive; perform bee dances to learn how bees communicate directions; and learn about bee predators and honey robbers. They learn about the honeybee from books, videos and posters of bee anatomy and life stages.  The drawing of a bee mural captures each elements of the session as it comes into play.  A talk by a guest beehive keeper and/or a field trip to a local beekeeper, on Friday, will expand the learning about the honeybee.

Week 7: Aug 6 – Aug 9 (4 days)

MATH ON THE MENU

AcadeCampers plunge into the entrepreneurial world as they open, equip, and expand an ethnic restaurant…with all the attendant real-life mathematical challenges. They apply different problem-solving strategies as they plan and enlarge the menu, determine different combinations of ingredients, analyze costs, set prices, and address interior logistics when the restaurant expands to a second location. Campers have the opportunity to use a wide variety of combinatorial, statistical, mathematical-reasoning, and organizational skills. Friday afternoon lunch date at the AcadeCamp restaurant.

Week 8: Aug 12 – Aug 16

EARLY ADVENTURES IN ALGEBRA

AcadeCampers build a foundation in algebraic thinking. Using the compelling context of “Zero the Hero,” campers learn the important role zero plays in our number system. In a series of activities, including engaging games and challenges, they solve for unknowns, explore the concepts of equality and inequality, and represent and analyze mathematical situations using algebraic symbols. Throughout the session, camp counselors facilitate group discourse and encourage campers to explain their thinking. AcadeCampers develop crucial scaffolding for more complex algebraic reasoning.  Face Off math challenge on Friday afternoon.