Last but not least - Vive la France

Paris absolutely mesmerized us with it's beauty. Cherry on top being magnificent Eiffel Tower dominating the skyline of  the "city of lights" - called that not only due to lights but also due to the number of intellectuals living in the city. We also learned about Marseille, Lyon and Nice.

The dancing was not as upbeat as other dances but we enjoyed it anyway. We danced to the "Sur le pont d'Avignon". Anoushka and Akshata sang the song L'arraignee Gypsy and impressed everyone.

In interesting facts, we marveled at the speeds of TGV and compared the timings of TGV to Indian trains - just to understand how fast they really are, not to point out how slow the Indians trains are :). The next amazing fact was the number of cheeses found in France. Over 1000 types of cheeses - 400 types of French kind! Cheese vans are very much a cheese heaven.

Games were all about pantomime - not an easy art indeed as kids learned but a great learning tool when exploring the possibilities of communication. We learned we need to be very precise with what we try to communicate via pantomime.

Kids created some amazing crafts that will remind them of things we learned about France through fun and games. Just learning and researching about France makes you want to visit it as soon as possible.

Beautiful and very French craft :)

Sur le pont d'Avignon on y danse, touse en rond...

Who's hungry? :)
P.S. I was tempted to put only: "Who  thinks this is the best summer camp ever?" ;)

We bid goodbye to France and thus our second summer camp came to an end. We all enjoyed it a lot. It was fun making it fun for kids.

See you all next year!

La bella Italia

Priyanka took us on a journey to Italy today. After we learned how to locate Italy on the globe - everyone now knows where the country that looks like a boot is located and got introduced to some beautiful cities of Italy, we listened with great interest to an Italian fable about a magic fish.
In craft time we made Italian flag with our hand cutouts and ribbons to make a cute craft to display in our room. Followed by dancing the Italian way - another upbeat jumpy dance from Europe we all enjoyed.

Snack was, of course, pizza. Mamma mia, it was delizioso!

Did you know Telugu is sometimes called Italian of the East? That is because just like Telugu, most of the words end with a vowel.

Finally we played the game: What time is it Mr. Wolf? (Lupo delle ore) to finish our Italian adventure. Tomorrow is our last day of summer camp and we will venture to France!

Pizzas being prepared...

Ready to be put int he oven!

Kids busy doing crafts.

Craft creations.

Listening to the "Magic Fish" story.

Dancing.

Scwarzwalder Kirschtorte

So, back to Germany. What a magnificent country. Apart from basic facts and figures we admired beautiful photos of major cities, learned what all inventions came from Germany - now we know Diesel engine is named that because Rudolph Diesel invented it, for example. From the not so scientific ones we were amazed that gummy bears are German invention. Way to go Germans! It seems it is also thank to Germans that we decorate Christmas trees. Did you know that?

We made funky Edelweiss Hats for crafts and we also sang the famous Edelweiss song from the movie Sound of Music. Such a beautiful, gentle song that kind of forces the singers to sing softly or as we say, using soft voices. The German dance made us all cheerful again and hungry! Black forest cake was our snack today! Yummy!

Games, few surprise dance performances, a singing performance and the day again got over too fast. Summer camp is fun and time flies when we have fun.

Tomorrow we are off to modern Italy. Ciao! A domani! :)

Good morning! Let's sing our morning song..Together we can change the world...

Arrav with his Edelweiss hat :)

Akshata showing her creation...

Dancing...

Sirtaki dancing and Gyros

Back to future, back to Greece. Modern Greece was so easy to present since it is such a beautiful place. With 16.5 million tourists visiting each year it is obviously attractive as attractive gets. We absolutely skipped the troubled present and current state of the country and we rather focused on it's strengths and beauty.

We learned few words in Greek, saw many beautiful pictures and created a small momentum in our craft time - making an olive with an attached message that will remind us of Greece. Afterwards it was time to hit the dance floor with Sirtaki dance. Another dancing success with kids :)

All that dancing made us hungry and we were off to feast on our snacks - Gyros. The final act was the game - a Greek version of a dodge ball called MALI. I think kids will want to play it again and again no doubts :)

Kushi with her craft pinned to her dress :)

Sirtaki dance fun!

Kids showing what they have learned.

Yummy Gyros.

Summer Camp Song

Just as last year, we have kept the same amazing song for out morning song each day for our Passepartout Summer Camp and the children just don't seem to get tired of it at all - on contrary - they love it. I would like to share a very touching background to this song that you can hear and see in the attached you tube video below.

"Together We Can Change the World, Inc (TWCCTW) played a major role in bringing an African Youth Choir called SIFA to USA for a tour. All of the children are AIDS orphans. The goal was to raise money for the children to take back to Uganda in order to finish building their orphanage and to build new homes for them to live in.
Their six month tour was a tremendous success. Every where they went people just fell in love with them. A very good friend of TWCCTW, Mark Shepard, wrote a song that describes the heart of what the do and why they built this company. Before the SIFA Choir left to go back to Uganda, they were able to get them and a young lady named Rilee O'Neill into a recording studio to lay down this song so it could get placed on an upcoming SIFA project and promoted by them."

Lyrics:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

I believe it’s not too late

Together we can change the world
Lay the puzzle pieces out
Find out what it’s all about
Together we can change the world

Can't do it by myself

So I’m asking for your help
Together we can change the world
Sail past where it’s been charted
Roll your sleeves up, let’s get started
Together we can change the world
Together we can change the world

With our hands and with our hearts
We can dare to make a start

Together we can change the world
What if we spoke with one voice,
Knowing that we have a choice?
Together we can change the world

Change your mind and change your life
Set aside the fear and strife
Together we can change the world
When we open up our eyes
Then we start to realize
Together we can change the world

Polka dance and singing

First week of our second summer camp is over. Time sure flew and we thoroughly enjoyed every single day.

Friday's destination was Slovenia. We learned a lot about this small beautiful country. Not only, that it is 3 hours long and two hours wide when traveled by car but also that Slovene people are nuts about climbing the hills and mountains and that they enjoy dancing polka at almost every occasion that involves folk music. We tried it out and got the kick out of it. Anoushka and I sang a traditional Slovene song "Lipa" (Linden tree) to add some authentic touch.

For the crafts we created beautiful birds made entirely out of ribbons. A very simple design with a cute outcome. The snacks was "milk rice" the Slovene way. A slight disappointment - it seems it is just to similar to Indian version of it :)

Unfortunately we were too busy dancing the polka and forgot to take photos! I can not stress enough how heart warming it was for me to see 30 Indian kids enjoying the polka dance with the most famous Slovene folk song in the background.

Bye, bye kiddos! See you on Monday. FYI, we are leaving the history behind and going back to present time visiting same 5 countries and looking at them from a different, modern perspective.

Lovely birds we made!

Rally race with the ball between the knees. Not as easy as it seems! :)

Impressed with Napoleon

Bonjour! Voila, we have traveled back in time again and met Napoleon Bonaparte. We were very impressed with him. What a masterful leader!

We learned a traditional french dance bourree that was surely popular in the times of Napoleon. We liked it too! After dance we played "dragon's tail" and "pop the balloon" games. Kids enjoyed them so much that even Supriya, our amazing "summer camp snacks in charge", came to see why we are late for snacks. That reminded us that our stomachs are rumbling and we quickly went up to dinning hall to enjoy the crepes, thin pancakes that originate in Brittany, a northwest region of France. With jam...mmmmmmm.

There was only one thing left to do - crafts. We made cockades in the colors of French flag - just like the one Napoleon wore pinned on his hat. What is a cockade? It's an ornament, very much like a rosette usually worn on a hat as a badge.

Tomorrow we will visit my beloved country Slovenia :)

Let's learn the bourree dance steps!

Get that tail!

Pop the balloon and keep your's safe.

Complete silence (a rare thing in the summer camp) when everyone enjoyed  crepes.

Germany, anyone?

Germany in the past. What fun! Well, we have encountered some resistance when presenting the history facts of Germany (ahem! i am trying to forget the numerous yawns during my presentation) and children did not warm up to Charlemagne much. We did draw some meaningful parallels with Benedict about the passion for education and over all progress of the society so not all was lost after all.

For snacks we ate Kartofel latke (yes, we made the name up!) for snack. Only kids who could pronounce the world Kartofel (German for potato) were eligible for second helping.

If the history part was not a big hit we made it all up with the German dance. It was a major hit with kids with all that clapping and tapping to the yodel music. We topped that off with really beautiful craft activity where we made natural fires out of stones, twigs and colored paper. Another successful summer camp day indeed! We are happy and we are having tons of fun :)

Busy with making miniatures nature fires.

Ahhh, look what we have created! 

Supriya demonstrating how she made Kartofel latke.

How strong is your bridge? Can our army pass? 

Tug of war to end it.

Benedict and Columbus

Today we traveled back in time again and visited Italy. Well, it was not yet called Italy but just to give you an idea why we had pasta for snacks :)

Why did we learn about Benedict? That was the question i asked at the end of the first part of the presentation and one child replied: "Because he was so special! He was close to God plus he worked so hard and valued education above all." Yes, not only be good, but do good too - and work hard in life. I could not have thought of a better conclusion myself! We also realized that these values are very close to us - the people in the future - and they were so special then just because times were very different back then after the Dark ages. While Benedict, a patron Saint of entire Europe and all students, was a stranger to all of the kids the next person was not. Every one heard of Columbus!

We got inspired by his persistence in achieving his dream but we also learned that greed is not a very good thing - it got Columbus into a lot of trouble. The ships he sailed with were the focus for our craft part. We learned  how they looked and what an impressive journey they managed to achieve. The lead ship had a name very easy for us to remember! Santa Maria! Close enough to the name of our school to never forget it again.

Little hints to help them draw the ship

Most of kids took the challenge of drawing a ship - a lot of them stuck to the familiar territory though of drawing flowers, Ganesha, etc.

A neat collection of Santa Maria ships.

After the presentation and crafts session we went out to test our skills in our famous hop scotch game. Definitely a Sancta Maria special :) we could probably patent it! A hopscotch game with many task to accomplish while balancing on one leg - pouring water from one glass to another, throwing a ball up in the air and catching it, avoiding rough seas and sharks by jumping over them and hitting the target basket with a candy. Kids love it and without even knowing it is a wonderful motor skill challenge for them that boosts their skills.

Hop scotch jump Columbus style :)

Balance!

Akshata:"Columbus discovered America by chance. He wanted to find  India"

The final session was dancing. We were not able to finish all the things we planned yesterday when visiting the ancient Greece but we promised children we will make it up today. So Girish taught them a wonderful dance from ancient Greece that we all enjoyed. I actually found a lot of resemblance with some folk dances from Europe i know.

Dancing. Holding hands and managing steps - team work and fun :)

P.S. If any of you wonder how we pick our topics for this first week of the summer camp, where we travel back in time and explore history I want to tell you that we were inspired by a history book written for kids: E.H. Gombrich, A little History of The World. A book that  is on almost every list of "50 books every should have at home" and it is a wonderful introduction to history in s simple language all kids understand.

Summer camp No.2- Passepartout returns

Everyone on their marks...ready to tackle the "stade". The what?  Read on...

The time has come again for the summer camp! The first day we visited ancient Greece and learned how Olympic games looked like way back (2,788 years back, mind you!) when they first started. Children were super amused that athletes in ancient Greece competed naked! Aditya was seriously concerned if they still practice that strange habit. Not to worry! :)

After learning about the ancient Olympics we actually performed mini Olympics and had 3 different events to compete in. Discus throw (we used a flat stone), long jump (our sand pit came in super handy) and a sprint - one of the first sports in ancient Olympics. The 183 meters long race (200 yards) - a measurement called a "stade" - now you know where the word "stadium" comes from!
In those times the stadiums were much wider allowing more then 20 runners to run at the same time. We did it the same way! What fun.

Our first event winner!

A mighty throw of the stone!

The winners adorned with wreaths :)

After the games we focused a bit on art! We discovered the beauty of ancient Greek pots - the simple, yet beautiful patterns they used for their pots. We enjoyed re-creating them using our imagination and guidance from what we learned today!

What focus! :)

Nice and steady, Aditya! 

A work of art indeed.

What are we doing tomorrow? Well, you will just have to wait and see...

   DAY ~ 6

 Celebrating moon festivals form around the world.

 Leaning how to make Rakhis.

Playing Holi!!

Bright colors, water balloons and melodious songs are the ingredients of perfect Holi...

 A touch of green i send to u. A drop of blue to cool the hue. A tinge of red for warmth & zest.

 Colors of joy, colors of happiness, colors of friendship..

DAY ~ 7

Paint the town red!

Camping under the tables..