We were fast approaching the end of our summer adventure, and the tenth week was given over to heroes and superheroes.
The children stepped into the world of firefighters and found out what it means to be a hero in the fight against flames. We talked about courage, but also about its less spectacular side: about training, about rules followed to the letter and about what you, as a child, do in an emergency. A hero is not someone who feels no fear, but someone who knows what to do when they do.
Then we took the other side of the story: a true superhero is balanced between strength and intelligence. The children gave their imagination free rein and created comic strips full of adventure and suspense. It is a more serious exercise than it looks: to make a comic strip work you have to split a story into frames, decide what is shown and what is told, leave room for the dialogue and keep the character recognisable from one drawing to the next.
Still in superhero territory, we discovered the wonders of symmetry in an interactive way. Symmetry has the advantage of being checkable on the spot, by folding or with a mirror, and it was the children who noticed that many of the costumes and emblems they had drawn were, without meaning to be, symmetrical.
The day of Super Maths arrived too, with amusing challenges solved with enthusiasm and a great deal of laughter. When a problem carries a superhero's name, resistance to maths drops considerably — and analytical thinking works just as well.
As in every week, the children had two English lessons taught by our Cambridge CELTA-certified teacher. The summer then closed with the end-of-season party, where we celebrated everything the children had achieved across the eleven weeks.
More about the PlusKids Summer School: https://pluskids.ro/en/summer-school