Trashion show to sustainable activities at skills camp for kids

With the Year of Giving drawing to a close and schools gearing up for winter camps, one small school in Deira - in line with the country's initiative - is hosting a free of cost edutainment camp titled Innovation Camp, for children aged 4-15 years.
The three-day camp at Sabari Indian School (SIS) targeting children across the UAE started on Tuesday. The all-skills based camp includes fun and innovative activities linked to the umbrella theme of Expo 2020, 'Connecting Mind and Creating the Future'. Some highlights of the camp include sustainable activities like trashion show where kindergarten kids make fancy dresses by recycling waste and do a ramp walk.
Over 60 schools and nurseries registered to be a part of the initiative and the first day had attendance of around 500 students. A total of 50 teachers, parents, professionals and experts from the community and schools have volunteered to make a difference in the lives of the children in the UAE.
Another innovative activity being offered at the camp is Vedic mathematics, an ancient form of math that offers shortcuts for children to remember and compute faster. Children used the tiles of their very classrooms as a grid and played while learning to calculate faster. The drone prone activity was another section that attracted a lot of enthusiasts who learnt to fly drones not by remote but by using codes on their iPads. Drone expert Anthony was surrounded with kids as he taught them to be drone pilots. Controlling a drone through simple coding on their iPads would build their programming skills and they could later also develop apps, he said.
"Looking at the sub themes of Expo 2020 - opportunity, mobility and sustainability - our camp is based on the same as it offers opportunity for different kinds of learning for hundreds of students. It helps them gain new skills; creates mobility as children moved from one classroom to another as they performed different activities; and for sustainability part, we introduced the trashion show where children learnt to recycle and use waste material, spreading awareness that nothing should go waste and everything can be reused," Latha Venkateswar, principal, Sabari Indian School, told Khaleej Times.
Talking about the idea behind the innovative camp, Venkateswar said: "The camp is a generous act of gifting joy and learning to the children and UAE community. This is the vision of Raza Khan, CEO of Al Najah Education that owns SIS, who gave us this idea that since children have cooperated and given so much to the society by donating to different causes, so why not gift them in terms of skills. This camp is our gift for the children of the UAE," she added.
The camp is also offering activities such as arts, dance and music, digital learning, science shows as well as a pet's day out activity where students can bring in their pets on the school premises.
saman@khaleejtimes.com