Summer holiday camps for kids

'Educamping'

There have been a slew of interesting news reports recently on the growing popularity of ‘Educamping”; the most recent being in [Link href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/family/should-send-kids-educamping-summer/" text="The Daily Telegraph] who kindly also recommended Role Models for our summer holiday camps for kids in London.

The term ‘Educamping’ can open up more questions that it answers, and result in a wide range of responses from parents. Is the emphasis on education or is it on the camping? And what exactly is your child learning?

At Role Models, we understand the importance for parents that their children have fun during the school holidays and have a break from their usual day-to-day routine.

We believe that having fun is the best way for children to learn and indeed, essential! This is why we created our summer holiday camps - we wanted to take learning outside of the classroom and make it an uplifting experience for children.

It is for this reason that our summer holiday camps don’t employ traditional teaching methods, and instead use fun games and challenges to inspire children to think creatively, and work things out for themselves. For example, we might challenge children to make a helicopter out of various materials without any instructions. Activities such as this one teach children to collaborate with each other, without being spoon-fed by adults.

This is at the heart of what Role Models aims to teach children, to increase their confidence in their own ability and to think independently. Through our school holiday camps and courses, we want to nurture and develop soft skills, which we believe are just as essential as conventional skills, such as numeracy and literacy.

Soft Skills at Our Summer Holiday Camps

What do we mean by soft skills? Soft skills are personal attributes that enable people to interact with each other in a positive and effective way. For instance, having empathy, being creative and showing determination or ‘grit’ are all examples of soft skills.

Soft skills also encompass being able to work in a team and understanding how to lead using your own unique strengths. By nurturing soft skills in children, we are teaching them how to be more confident and resilient; showing them that they have the resources within themselves to cope with whatever may come their way in life.

The main benefit of our kids summer holiday camps is that they ultimately teach children to help themselves. Following last year’s camps, 79% of parents reported that they felt their children’s resilience and confidence in themselves had improved since doing the camp, whilst 93% of parents gave full marks for their children’s enjoyment.

The Role Models philosophy is based on a growing base of empirical evidence linking children’s wellbeing to academic attainment and their life satisfaction levels as an adult.

A [Link href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-link-between-pupil-health-and-wellbeing-and-attainment" text="Public Health Study] in 2014 concluded that education and health are closely linked and that promoting the health and wellbeing of pupils has the potential to improve their educational outcomes and their health and wellbeing outcomes. The key points from the evidence are:

Pupils with better health and wellbeing are likely to achieve better academically.
Effective social and emotional competencies are associated with greater health and wellbeing, and better achievement.
The culture, ethos and environment of a school influences the health and wellbeing of pupils and their readiness to learn.
A positive association exists between academic attainment and physical activity levels of pupils.

In 2015, Alejandro Adler from the University of Pennsylvania led a [Link href="http://www.ipositive-education.net/gross-national-happiness-and-positive-education-in-bhutan/" text="study teaching well-being] on a large scale to school children in Bhutan to assess whether teaching well-being increases academic achievement.

Their results indicated that their curriculum, designed to enhance student well-being, not only increased well-being, but it also substantially and significantly increased students’ performance on standardized tests (Cohen’s d = 0.53). Well-being and academic achievement seem not to be antagonistic, as some have suggested; on the contrary, increased well-being raised academic achievement.

In 2014, Lord Richard Layard and his colleagues at the Wellbeing research programme at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance concluded that a [Link href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/08/happiness-childhood-emotional-health-richard-layard" text="child’s emotional health is far more important to their satisfaction levels as an adult] than other factors, such as if they achieve academic success when young, or wealth when older.

In summary, child wellbeing has been shown to be an indicator of academic success and adult life satisfaction levels.

If you want to learn more about our range of school holiday camps then please [Link href="http://www.rolemodels.me/featuredevent/life-skills-courses/" text="CLICK HERE.]