Inventing some stuff...

Funny how things time out..

Henry and Syd both get sick...

And Charley gets to go put on his inventor's hat all day everyday last week (well from 9-3:30).

And boy was he out of practice with the whole busy all day thing.

He was wiped afterwards.

On Friday we got to go get a peek at all the stuff they had been working on all week.

Henry obviously wanted in on the whole gig and was feeling much better on Friday.

I love that happy face poking in on this picture.

This camp was run through the neighboring district that I used to teach in.

All four of the teachers that worked the camp were amazing and all educators I had worked with when I was a teacher.  They hadn't seen Charley since he was 2 or 3.  Crazy to leave him with them for days of learning, but also SO easy, because I knew he was in spectacular hands.

All week they learned about different inventors and different inventions.

They also got to make prototypes of inventions that they thought up.

 Charley said one of his accidentally got in the garbage.  HAHA!  This cracked me up...because if you weren't a mom of one of these little inventors you probably wouldn't have seen the invention in the creations.   Because, they used upcycled/recycled items to make their inventions.

They also created a city of some sort that included magnets and electric thingy-ma-jigs that turned on.

Pretty cool.

These boys are obviously really checking out T and Charley's handy work.  All are brothers. 

They also each got to bring an item from home to take apart (Charley brought an old VCR).  They spent part of the week taking it apart, exploring how it worked, and then using the parts with a team to build a contraption that would pop a water balloon, INSIDE the school.  The inside part was pretty amazing to the boys...given that their moms would never let that happen.

Since we had connections with the teacher the boys got to give us a demonstration....a few hundred times. 

Charley has now experienced Boy Scout camp this summer with daddy and Invention Camp with his buddy.  And I think back to my days as a camp counselor and think so fondly of that job.  I know it didn't rake in the big bucks for my college fund.  But the skills, confidence, friendships, songs, skits, first aide, etc...all of it, have been a HUGE influence on my teaching and mothering experience.  I would really like to keep giving the boys experiences that will lead them to possibly having a summer job where they are spending their summers with other healthy kids, outdoors, having fun, working hard, and developing confidence in themselves. 

Ick, let's not talk about them having summer jobs anymore. 

Charely said, in 5 years I will be twelve...

That fact did not impress me in the least. 

Sorry buddy.

But the next rainy afternoon I will be setting up shop for Charley and Henry in our basement with a screw driver some old gadget, some duct tape, and whatever else we can dig up.  I have a feeling it might keep them busy for hours!  And clean up would be easy enough..it all could get dumped, eventually.