Summer Day Camp 2010
Tenley Circle Camps are offering great opportunities for language immersion, academic enrichment, and learning through summer fun again this summer. This year's camp runs from June 21 - August 13, 9 am - 4 pm, with before and after care available.
- For kids 2½ - 5 years old, Caterpillar Camp gives young children a chance to be immersed in Spanish or French, build social and cognitive skills with their peers, and experience play-based learning. Full and half day schedules are available.
To learn more, download the Caterpillar Camp Brochure.
- For kids ages 6-13, Tenley Circle Camp offers academic enrichment through language immersion, cultural exploration, and fun ways to increase math, reading, and technology skills. Children have many different opportunities to explore the world around them, through field trips, hands-on learning, career exploration, and more.
To learn more, download the Tenley Circle Camp Brochure.
There are 2 spots left in French for the week of June 21-25. The week of June 28-July 2 is full for French and we are no longer accepting applicants for that week.
To register for either camp, download the City Gate Summer Day Camp registration form, and complete one per child.
For more information, download the camp brochures above, call us at (202) 237-1799, or email us.
We hope to see you this summer!
Summer Camp 2009
Tenley Circle Camp
We had a successful nine weeks of summer at Tenley Circle Camp, traveling around the world and around Washington in forty days. As our theme implies — Around the World in Forty Days — we spent each week learning about a new part of the world, utilizing in-class art projects, the library, and exciting field trips. Our young camp staff from the DC Summer Youth Employment Program added greatly, planning and executing cultural lessons and weekly science projects for the older campers and planning almost all activities for the younger campers.
One of the great successes this summer was our collaboration with an English Language School in which college students from around the world worked with our kids every Wednesday afternoon, allowing campers to learn songs in Spanish and French, to write their names in Arabic and Thai, and put on plays that represent Indian and Australian folklore. A Fourth of July celebration joined together our campers and their families with all of the international students and their teachers at a barbeque, followed by a concert that demonstrated America's diversity by our campers.
We also had some great trips with Urban Hands groups. All of our campers took the Metro downtown with an Urban Hands group to the Old Post Office Pavilion where we went up a tower and saw all of our Nation's Capitol from above. Afterward, we went on a scavenger hunt at the American History Museum, especially focusing on the history of transportation in the U.S.
Photos of our field trips on Flickr
Our favorite field trip of the summer was our trip to Mount Vernon with a family from Ohio. Campers piled into vans and made the trip to George Washington's estate, where we saw gardens, pet animals and toured the old mansion. After the field trip, the campers were talking about how "cool" Mt. Vernon was and how they wanted to return. What great feedback to hear on an educational field trip!
All of our fieldtrips were very enjoyable and included such places as the zoo (the younger kids had such a great time that they went twice), the Aquatic Gardens, many Smithsonian museums (including the African Art Museum which had a special exhibit titled "Artful Animals" and included an activity booklet with scavenger hunt, a reading room and a show put on by the Discovery Theater), the Building Museum, Rock Creek Park's Nature Center and free movies in Silver Spring.
While the campers learned a lot about the world and Washington DC this summer, camp staff and counselors also learned from the very smart and interesting kids that attended camp. Our campers represented many different cultures and backgrounds, and campers shared these cultures with the class. We had campers from Venezuela, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico and China, and campers whose parents came from Ghana, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Argentina. This great diversity allowed kids to learn from each other, learn the importance of being an accepting multi-cultural society and the importance of understanding cultural differences and language barriers. Campers gave reports on their native countries, taught songs, and we even got to learn the days of the week from an indigenous language of Ghana.