Jamie at Summer Club

Writing this now in September, the summer holidays seem to have flown by but when they are looming and you think what can I do with a 10 year old for 6 weeks the opportunity to take up one of the summer club options is very appealing.  Not because you want to get them out of the way but because you want them to be active and creative with their time and not spend it on the PC, laptop, Xbox, Wii or watching television, there is ample time to do that outside of summer club hours. 

We have been lucky for the past two summers in having a summer club organised by some of the teachers at Jamie's school, so the club has been a few minutes walk away and we are familiar with those running it and they are familiar with Jamie, which gives us the sense of security that the sessions will be enriching.  That one of them is one of Jamie's favourite teachers ever is also a bonus.  So Jamie went off every day for his first week to summer club and enjoyed it enormously.

There were many different activities for them to do ranging from sport and outdoor fun to creative play inside.  Every day Jamie came home with 3 or 4 items which he had made, painted, or produced and of course which get displayed proudly on the fridge or freezer.  He tried his hand at quite a lot of activities such as pottery, screen printing, mask making amongst others.  I personally was hoping for another of the lovely herb pots which they made last year to match the one I have but they did different gardening this year.  Of course there are costs but they are by no means outrageous and in fact it all works out and very good value for money.

Another huge advantage is the opportunity to spend time at school just having fun - school can be a challenging place for many children and the chance to spend a whole week just having fun I think must help them in their day to day time at school and possibly improve results and performance in the longer term.

It is also nice to see the school building being used for an extra couple of weeks of the year too, I feel that communities have this wonderful resource in their midst and they are never used to the full advantage.  I seem to recall my junior school being used for a variety of activities including evening classes.  It is a shame that two or three local school could not employ someone between them to market the schools outside of school hours to  bring in extra funding for the schools.

Jamie enjoyed his second week too although he was only there for the mornings but that did give us the opportunity to do other activities in the afternoon and for him to meet and play with his friends and it kept him off the dreaded games consoles for a few extra hours!!  I set out at the beginning of the holidays not to hear "I'm bored" and the summer club is a good first start to achieving that objective.

Ciao

Sue
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Reading challenge 13/16 - currently reading If I Was by Midge Ure