Brain Gain
This week in Brain Gain members continued to build — critical thinking, planning, organization and presentation skills.
The group of participants spans a wide age, enabling the older children to develop their mentoring skills and work with the non-readers to accomplish tasks the younger kids are not yet academically ready for.
Mixed-age groups have been doing projects requiring them to work together, research and plan a finished product.
This week was a poster they collaborated on presenting their project to the whole group. The lessons focused on climate change following up on last week’s theme of weather.
Members discovered some rich websites with lots of accessible information and they worked with each other to answer three questions. What is climate change and how is it different this time than during other times in history, what are governments, businesses and agencies doing about the resulting problems and what can we, as individuals do to help slow the human caused effects of global climate change? Together the groups examined four problems as a result of global climate change: increasing temperatures, warmer oceans, more droughts and wildfires and bigger storms.
Kids discovered interesting and thought-provoking videos about the various storms that have devastated various parts of the world in recent years — this led to lots of fascinating group discussions.
Near the end of the week, the boys and girls played a “Jeopardy” game about climate change and it was exciting to see what they learned.
Morning Camp
“Why Is My Fish Glowing?”: It was a really exciting week doing science experiments with food. The kids used common household pantry items and made crayons, bouncy balls and slime.
The young campers experimented with color, dying milk and carnations. Dying the carnations was particular interesting to the members as they studied which color worked the quickest, what parts turned color first and what did they think that meant about parts of the flower getting the most food. Campers took home several art projects including some pictures created with dyed sand.
Pacific Planetarium field trip
The club kids spent Friday at the Pacific Planetarium in Bremerton learning about the night sky and our solar system. The dome environment has seats around the perimeter creating a wonderful viewing of the digital imagery.
On the first and third Fridays of the month the staff engages viewers in an hour-long talks on specific subjects and members were able to participate last week.
In addition, kids were able to explore the space science exhibit hall and visit the nearby park.
Theater thrills
The multi-purpose room has been transformed. With the addition of a new LCD projector and a few speakers we now have our own 3-D theater experience here at the club. With membership in the hundreds, it is often cost prohibitive to get all the kids out to enjoy the big screen so we brought it to us. With the inexpensive investment our multi-purpose room has one more use.
The nearly 20-foot wide projection makes new releases, classic films and our educational videos much more appealing.
Last week during Shark Week morning campers watched the birth of a whale on the big screen. It has been great to be able to break up the summer day with a little quiet time and cinematic hit!
Fine arts
The art room has been thriving this summer thanks to our longtime coordinator Heather Johnson. The room always is bustling with creative boys and girls and this week was no exception. The animal lovers group met in the art room this week and they were challenged to create collage pictures of cats or dogs. No scissors were allowed in the creation of the darling pictures that group produced.
Toward the end of the week members gathered for a fine arts painting project. They each were given a small wooden structure, birdhouse, doghouses and the like. Each member creatively painted the home environment for the little stuffed animal that accompanied it.
