Week One

The beginning of this week was spent getting to know one another and becoming reacquainted with old friends.

Because the CYC is a lab school, some students are signed up to participate in research done by different departments on the campus of the University of Maryland. Children had an opportunity to meet some of these researchers this first week as they came and played with the campers in the classroom.

To kick off the study, children were asked what they already knew about energy. Many comments were about their own personal energy, then the conversation led to saving energy by turning out lights and shutting the refrigerator door. The teacher read a beginning science book titled, "Energy" by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. This gave the children an overview about different forms of energy. After the book, more ideas were added to an anchor chart web. Some ideas represented on the web were, "When you jump in the pool you use energy , Fossil fuels are a kind of energy, and Fire has energy."

The following day, the children were introduced to the acronym CMELTS, which represented the six forms of energy we would be exploring over the next weeks of summer camp. Children were asked to guess what each letter stood for until the actual energy forms of Chemical, Mechanical, Electric, Light, Thermal, and Sound were discovered.

On Friday, children participated in an "energy sort" with pictures that represented different uses of each of the six forms of energy to be studied. During this process, campers discovered that most things utilized multiple forms of energy, such as a television that uses electricity, light, and sound.

For part of quiet time each day, when the younger children at the camp sleep, the Blue Room campers have journal writing and reading time. A journal prompt is given to allow focus when constructing sentences. This first week children were required to write two sentences. Another writing assignment was to write a question about energy that they could seek the answer to during the summer project. These questions will be added to a list that will grow as more specific topics on energy are explored.