The Anti-List for the holidays

The exams are finally, finally over for the twins. Jordan finished much earlier but Evan's drudgery only ended yesterday. Coincidentally, I was asked to write a piece about holidays activities. I thought about it and Packrat and I are pretty much of the opinion that JED, having relatively busy school days should be allowed to do nothing during the holidays. There is a great amount of value in giving them time to be bored.

So our default is to let them come up with their own games , read, go to the library, hang out and go downstairs to muck about or to explore new parks. And oh! Evan has asked for us to go back to Willing Hearts to do some work there. That, we'll definitely do at some point this June.

There. Done.

But I don't think that was what I was asked to write about though.

And honestly, there have been times where we've needed to park the kids somewhere so as to not drive their care-givers crazy while we were away or because they really wanted to learn something new.

So, the list that I'm sharing is of places that JED have tried before and have had quite a bit of fun with.

a. Art camps
A big hit even at this point with the twins being 10. There's always joy in mucking about with paint and creating something from it. We have excellent pieces on our walls courtesy of these art camps and it brings JED so much joy from being able to see their work on the walls.

We've done a few and some are better than others. We did one where I was told the kids weren't listening to instructions and painting it as they were told. We never went back there again even though it was close by us. We have however gone to heART Studio many times over even though it's further away. Their holiday programmes are by the day so it's great if you want them occupied for a couple of hours; though I'm tempted to sign Muffin up for the 2 day Dinosaur one.

b. Science camps.
I've heard that the BASF Science Labs for June are all filled up already and science camps are a whole lot of experimenty fun. The one that we really liked and we sent them to while we were away was a Discovery Vacation Camp which was a 5 day full day camp where they did experiments, went on field trips and actually learnt stuff they remember till today. The only thing about that was that Jordan said she felt homesick. Because it was longer than the typical school day. But that said, she remembers it fondly and they went as a big group of friends so it was a lot of fun.

c. Writing camps
Though only the twins have gone for writing camps, Muffin remembers fondly the time he sat in one with the twins. This was Monsters Under the Bed's Monsters HuntINK camp a few years back. I think at that point, they were still too young for it but they talk about the hydra and the medusa that they learnt about during that workshop. And then, there was the workshop they did last year, where they wrote and published their own book.

They would be happy if I sent them back to any of the ones above but what they really really want to go for is a building workshop where they learn coding and creating games because that's often what is on their minds these days. Evan got his hands on a flyer for the Tink Tank one and has cancelled off the ones that he's learnt in school like Scratch and decided that he wanted to do the MBot and Sphero one. Muffin is keen because he knows that Sphero built the BB-8 we have rolling around the house, though I cautioned him that it wasn't what he was going to build in 2 hours there. Jordan was torn between that and another workshop called Little Bits where you learnt to work with circuitry but Packrat said if they were going, they were ALL going to the same workshop.

There. A list. Of what I would do, what they could do if I gave them the chance to and what they really really want to do. 

All I can say is, I don't really care what we're going to do. I'm just ecstatic that the exams are over and we can do everything we want to or choose to do absolutely nothing.