We were provided with classes for review. All thought are our own. When is summer camp not a summer camp? When it happens year round is the obvious answer. That’s the case with Play Well. During the summer Play Well has dozens upon dozens of LEGO camps for kids 5-14. Our oldest son attended a Play Well LEGO Camp the other week and absolutely loved it. We liked it too, for many reasons. However, going back to our original ‘boy-turns-into-a-store’ metaphor, Play Well has LEGO classes year round to engage your budding brick builder.
When we first entered class our 6 year old was very eager to get started. “OK, you can leave now daddy” he said with all of the curtness of a child who was ready to start making something. Before leaving I took a quick walk of the area and saw approximately two dozen rectangular boxes that were jam packed with LEGO’S. They were LEGO bricks of any size, shape, thickness and functionality. There were easily tens of thousands of LEGO bricks for the class to get snapping with.
Our child has a couple of LEGO sets, as well as, one box of free play bricks. I’ve encouraged him to build his own creations, but he always defaults to playing or building with the ones that have instructions. It’s not that I want my child to play the way I played, but when I was a kid I just had bricks. I couple make anything, within reason-and using my imagination, as long as it didn’t require wheels. The only way my LEGO creations as a kid would move is if they hitched a ride with another toy.
But the point is there were no instructions. I want our kids to be able to create the freakiest snake-dragon car or mega airplane that they want to without needing instructions and know that it’s OK to simply make things up.
The Minecraft Play Well Lego Summer Camp that he attended did that. It was a class of about a dozen kids, boys and girls, aged 5-7 in our case who wanted to have fun. Kids are natural engineers, we just help the realize it-that’s the tagline that you’ll see when you visit the Play Well website.
As a parent that puts things perfectly. I want our kids to be curious, wonder about how things are assembled, take things apart and imagine their own magical creations.
Camp started slowly, with them receiving a pre-sorted amount of bricks so that each camper had the same amount of bricks. As the week went on they seemed to break off into teams where they built a Minecraft structure, complete with a grocery store and block headed people to populate it.
“What did you do at camp today”, I asked.
“Nothing”, he said. In speaking with another parent they received the same answer too. However I assured them that they aren’t doing ‘nothing’ and relayed to them what our son told us once he felt like talking. A 6 year old boy can be a funny, non-talkative thing indeed.
It’s important to note that our son does not play Minecraft. He knows what it is from his friends, but doesn’t know anything about the game or its world. Even after the camp he’s not saying that he wants to play Minecraft, but he is more confident about building some original things with his box of free range LEGO’s.
The Play Well camp took place at our local recreation center, which is now simply referred to as ‘LEGO Camp place’ by the kids. They’ve got some after school programs to motivate STEM thinking and the summer camp that we attended is one activity that we’re already marking down for next year. The camp was three hours long, which was a great length of time to allow for some outside play, just in case the weather allowed it.
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