Teamwork Makes the Dream Work!

Here at Chatham our classes have been particularly great at working as teams in classes and at break time.

Learning to work as a team strengthens not only the lessons being learned in class but friendships as well.  Yesterday we played a new game, "5-4-3-2-1" in which students are asked to spontaneously group themselves in a specific number in order to not get eliminated.  There were groups of all ages working together to problem solve and work to make sure as many children as possible could get into groups.  Here are some pictures!

Check out our flickr page here to see more pictures from the week and to see all the great things the children are working on.  

Positivity at Chatham

This summer's mantra at International Ivy is Educate, Encourage, Empower.  This week at camp we have seen campers, teachers and counselors working together to help each other grow.  The focus has definitely been on the students and helping them to produce their best work.

Educate

In our sewing class our teacher is educating the class with new techniques with patterns and different materials.

Encourage

Our campers have been encouraging each other during break times with creative ideas and good sportsmanship.

Empower

Our students feel confident in the new skills that they learn in class to complete individual challenges. 

Later on in the week the students will get a chance to visit each others' classes for our sharing showcase.  Stay tuned for pictures and videos!

Week 3 at Chatham!

Today we got off to an exciting start.  We have both new and returning campers and some new classes that are running, like Adventure Quest.  We also have some old favorites like Youngster, Minecraft, Biomedical Engineering and Robotics.

This afternoon during break we had another opportunity to get to know each other and use teamwork to win some relay races.

 It was a great Monday and we saw many happy campers excited to come back tomorrow.

Check out our Flickr Page to see more pictures and videos from this week!

Birthdays, Wacky Hair and Hats!

Greetings from Chatham!  We loved our second Theme Thursday of the summer, which was wacky hair and hat day.

We also had our first birthday celebration of the summer for one of our Youngsters.  We are really working on building a sense of community within the camp and making friends between classes.  

We have our sharing showcase tomorrow and we will have the opportunity to check out each others' classes.  Check back tomorrow for a link to some videos from our showcase!  Until then, click here to see our week two album from Chatham.  

Cheers, 

Kalyna, Colleen, Jon and Mary Claire 

Our Campers are going GAGA for Princeton Week 2

Week TWO may be a shorter week due to the 4th of July but our campers are wasting no time making friends and diving into their classes! Mobile App Design has six amazing kids here for full days and Creative Writing Workshop has three wonderful campers here in the afternoon!

Right from Tuesday morning our Mobile App campers were becoming "best friends" as they said at break! By the end of morning session that had all assigned one another clever nicknames and had inside jokes.

Teacher Ryan assisting on a game design

O! O! O! We know the answer!! Pick Me!

Creative Writing Workshop began our week discussing metaphors and sharing our heart maps -- signaling the most important things within our hearts and our fears / dislikes on the outside. We use these maps to brainstorm and draw inspiration for our short stories.

Drew's Heart Map

Chloe's Heart Map

Tessa's Heart Map

Alison's Heart Map

Chloe brainstorming her short story

Morning and afternoon break consist of campers going GAGA over the game Gaga Ball! It has been a fan favorite all week any time the weather has been nice.

GAGA BALL!!!

For more pictures from WEEK 2 check out our Flickr Page! https://flic.kr/s/aHskCTXgJM

Week One at Chatham

Greetings from Chatham!

This week has flown by!  It has been great to see both returning and brand new campers have such an amazing week.  

Today we had some exciting break times.  This morning we played a kickball tournament for ivy points and to continue working on team building skills.  

During the afternoon break time we were able to enjoy the gorgeous weather to buy lemonade from out Lemonade Stand class.  All of the students were able to discuss the future businesses that they want to start and how this class has helped them.  

In order to see some more pictures of all the great things our campers have done this week, please visit our flickr account here.  Happy camping!

Princeton Week 1: Campers are Invested in their Brains!

"Investment Literacy and Stock Market Game" and "Brain Training" are off to a great start here at the Chapin School in Princeton. Our afternoon sessions may only have a handful of campers this week but they sure do bring a lot of enthusiasm and fun!


Investment Literacy started off with a general overview of the economy, the different phases and cycles, as well as key vocabulary. By Wednesday these campers are researching potential stocks and preparing for their investments when the Market opens tomorrow!

Brain training has been working hard to learn valuable study skills and engaging their minds in different academic games. They have been working hard to memorize the Presidents in order and will present this by the end of the week to the other campers!

WEDNESDAY IS WATER DAY!!! Of course this was a huge success and a great way to keep cool on this HOT HOT HOT June afternoon! The campers had an opportunity to dunk our counselor Ivan, as well as each other, in the dunk tank. We also had a water balloon toss which quickly turned into an all out water war! 

Check out of Youtube page for videos and our Flickr Page for additional photos,select Princeton 2016 Week 1 folder! Stay tuned for more excitement!

Chatham Week 6 Wrap-Up

Happy Friday!

Here is a summary of our STEAM oriented classes this week at Chatham.

SCIENCE - Our science classes this week were very unique.  In our Youngster class the students explored the living objects outdoors during their nature walks and our cooking classes learned the chemistry of the way that some foods change through the heating or cooling process.

TECHNOLOGY - The classes this week that were solely focused on technology were our Scratch, Java, 3D and 2D Video Game Creation classes.  They learned several types of coding languages as well as different ways to write programs.  Each student's unique game truly reflected their understanding and passion of the programming.

ENGINEERING - Our Civil Engineering class was able to build different structures in order to test out how much force a building or a bridge can withstand.  They were asked to complete challenges, build assigned buildings and come up with their own unique structures.

ARTS - The culinary arts class did a beautiful job of designing different desserts.  Learning how to express their artistic talents through cooking was a fun thing to do for the cutie cooks especially. Our Animation Film Making class also did some amazing work on their movie.  Their illustrations were very detailed and their filming talents were very impressive!  Our creative writing classes also used their minds to create lovely anthologies of their stories that were written all week.

MATHEMATICS - Our Java class learned a new understanding of numbers and number sense when coding their programs this week.

Our Flickr page and our weekly Animoto have some great pictures of our students exploring new interests.

Chatham - End of the Week Wrap-Up

This week at Chatham we had our largest group of campers, but we had so much fun and got so many things done.  One of the best parts of the week was our Friday Lemonade Stand from our Entrepreneurship class.  All of our campers participated in the buying of lemonade, which gave the class a lot of profit and proved helpful for learning how the marketing of a product leads to higher sales.  Please click here to see an animoto slide show of all of the pictures from their sale!

We really emphasized the different parts of STEAM this week - Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics.  From computer programming to Singapore math and cake design we saw many of our campers enjoy interests that they are not usually able to focus on outside of camp. Here is a link to our flickr album for week 5 which showcases snapshots from all of our classes and break time activities.  Stay tuned for week 6 posts starting Monday!

Chatham - Week 5 Highlights

What a beautiful week we're having! We have our biggest group of campers in the morning this week with 62 children and we're having an amazing time. 

Our International Ivy Flickr is loaded with amazing pictures from every location.  This is the link to see all the fun that not only the Chatham campers are having but the campers at other locations as well.  

Today we had Wet Day, which kicks off the week's themed days.  With such hot weather it was the perfect outdoor activity.  Thursday is Wacky Hair Day and Friday we are having both Connect Four and Kickball Tournaments.  Stay tuned for pictures! 

Also, check out our first Animoto for the week.  

Happy Halloween from Chatham!

This week at  Chatham is flying by!  This week we have an excellent group of fun-loving campers!  Wednesday was our second Wet Day of the summer and Counselor Krystel and Counselor Dave really made it a lot of fun for the kids.

We also have some campers that are seriously dedicated to Halloween!  Chatham has never had so many kids come in costumes as we did this week.  We have everything from a cactus to a few beautiful mermaids, not to mention a "Thing" or two (or three or four!).  We kept our costumes clean and in good shape because of our rainy day activity.  This week we quizzed the Ivy kids about some camp trivia.   Here are the rest of the pictures from Chatham's second week this summer.