ELISA ENGLISH's Blog 英語園地

My Summer Headache

Summer is approaching and I am getting a headache with where I can place my daughter when she is let out of school with 3 months of free time.  If you have been following my blog, you will probably get a glimpse of my daughter’s personality.  She is something.  She is so adorable, yet extremely hard to deal with.  She complains about boredom all the time.  You would think that kids at her age would be so excited when they hear that they are going on a field trip.  NO.  Not her.  When the school is off and I put her on the off-school care where kids go on a field trip, she gets upset with me.  Field trips are dumb and boring as she loudly proclaimed.  Not all field trips are boring to her, probably the ones that provide no educational values.  The field trips offered by the school are usually good because she learns something from visiting the Art Museum, the Science Museum or the Zoo.  A field trip to see a movie or a ball game offered by the off-school care is probably no fun for her.  Though she keeps telling me that kindergarten is boring, she feels it even worse staying with the after school care with all the free time she gets.  She is so happy that she gets to go to the Chinese after school program three times a week away from the after school care where free play is usually what kids do without any structure. 

It is so bad that summer camps are only geared towards families with stay-home parents or parents who are teachers.  The time of a day camp just doesn’t work for a family with working parents.  There are so many great camps that are offered in the summer but our kids do not have the luxury to take any of them.  I wonder if there are truly that many stay home parents.  Are we a minority with our needs simply ignored?  We did manage to have my son attend Camp Christmas offered by YMCA but the camp is swamped with mosquitoes that feast on him.  We pulled him out of the camp 2 days later as he was highly sensitive to mosquito bites.  Besides the camp quality, I have great concern on the quality of the staff on-site or off-site, run by a bunch of teenagers.  I have tried to find summer classes from the community education program that are offered on-site at the school’s summer care location.  I was only able to find the violin lesson that she can take once a week for 30 minutes for the entire summer and a 3-hour Lego class that runs for a week.  I suppose that we will have to stick with our school’s summer care and to listen to my daughter’s continuing whining about the boring field trips and how bored she is.               

Written by Elisa English

On 4/20/12