There are so many ways that we can bring learning to life throughout the year in our classroom spaces. From project sharing celebrations to classroom competitions, teachers find ways both large and small to keep students engaged and to bring joyful learning to classroom communities. Joyful learning is something that is often heightened in informal learning environments like camp, where the pressure of standards based lesson plans and other constraints aren’t present. In these spaces, counselors and camp educators are free to be “fun-forward” and lead with levity and excitement to keep students motivated and engaged in playful learning. While we may not be able to completely eschew standards or administrative constraints in our classrooms, there are still many ways we can leverage camp-style learning within our classrooms.

Bring camp into your space – literally!

The new Online Camps for GO, IQ, and VR feature video-based sessions led by your very own “VEX Camp Counselors”, where we guide students through camp activities with their VEX Kits or VEXcode VR. These can be great resources to use in your classroom. You can watch the videos together with your students, and let the Camp Counselors take care of the main instruction, so that you can be free to facilitate small group building and explorations.

These can be a useful tool to use with your students throughout the year. For instance: 

• Celebrate a successful classroom milestone with a camp session ‘party’
• Use a camp session for a substitute teacher lesson, so students can continue to use their VEX materials and the substitute can be responsible for just facilitating the experience 
• Bring in camp sessions in the days leading up to a school break, when students may need something a little different to keep them going 
• Show camp sessions as a between Unit break, where students can do a camp activity as a ‘palate cleanser’ before moving on to the next topic 
• Use camp as an end of semester or end of year celebration of learning, when you may have more flexible time schedules with your class

Build on students’ actual camp experiences…

Many of your students likely have some kind of camp experience, and that’s something you can work with! One of the early school year journal questions I often asked my students was about things that they did or learned or places they traveled to over summer vacation. Not only did it get my students writing about something comfortable to them, it gave me an opportunity to learn about them and to find commonalities in their experiences that I could use to help build community. 

Ask your students about their summer learning experiences and brainstorm together ways that you can bring some of that into the classroom. Finding out about what they were excited about learning can reap huge benefits when students see you circle back to that throughout the year. Not all students go to ‘camp’, but all students are learning over the summer. 

Here are some questions you can ask to help elicit meaningful responses: 

• Did you do any experiments over the summer, at a camp or with your family? What did you do? What were you trying to find out? What did you learn? 
• What was something you saw over the summer that was amazing to you? What questions did you ask or do you have about it? 
• What is one thing you learned about nature over the summer? How did you learn it? Why was that interesting to you? 
• Did you build anything over the summer, at home, at camp, or on vacation? What was your proudest moment? What was your biggest challenge? 
• Where was your favorite place you visited this summer? Why? What would you want to show or tell us about if you could take us there on a field trip? 
• Did you code anything over the summer? What were you trying to create? What did you learn from your coding project and/or your coding partners?

Don’t be afraid to be “campy” in the classroom

There is a certain level of showmanship that goes into engaging students in the classroom – no matter their age or the subject matter you’re teaching, being entertaining can help get your message across. But as the year goes on, there are times where it gets more difficult to bring that side of your teacher self to the classroom, particularly in the face of external pressures that emerge as the year progresses. However, if we can give ourselves the time and space to share our “campy” side, we are likely to create stronger relationships with our students and thus more meaningful learning.

You can plan for ‘camp’ – as you are thinking through or planning lessons, ask yourself if you would do anything differently if you were doing this activity in an informal education setting, like a camp. Would you ‘hook’ be more active and engaging? Would you have students doing more hands-on activities and less writing? Why would those changes happen? Then you can think about what you can do to keep the ‘fun-forward’ aspects alive in your classroom. Maybe you take an exploration outside to give you extra space or to let you be a little more messy. Perhaps you find a way to capture students’ learning through video or audio rather than a worksheet.

While the classroom can have more confines than camp, there is inspiration we can take from camp experiences (our own and our students’) to keep joyful learning alive in our school days.