A Homeschooler Goes to CTY Camp

By Jennifer Dees

The euphoria has yet to ebb, for either my daughter or me. We've just returned from an out-of-state stay so that my 9-year-old, homeschooled daughter could attend a 3-week summer day camp sponsored by Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth (CTY). This was her second summer attending this camp. Fresh with the excitement of the experience, I'll share here my personal impressions for the benefit of others who may be considering it.

A word about CTY
The CTY program is about 20 years old. It grew out of an earlier program that conducted research and provided programs for mathematically gifted kids, started by Dr. Julian Stanley at Johns Hopkins. Today, CTY includes programs in humanities, math, and science. There is a distance-learning program similar to Stanford's EPGY, and summer camps for gifted kids who have completed second through tenth grades. To participate in the program, kids qualify through “above-level” tests such as the SCAT (for the youngest kids) or the SAT (for 7th graders).

At the 2nd through 4th grade level, the summer camps are day programs, which largely draw attendance from their immediate areas. However, there are always people like us, who come from other states, and get a short-term rental apartment or hotel nearby. There are also some kids from other countries attending. My daughter's class of 12 this summer included one girl from Taiwan. At the 5th and 6th grade level, there are both day camps and residential camps to choose from. From 7th to 10th grade, camps are residential only.

The day camp experience for the youngest kids is different from the more comprehensive experience of residential camps. Since my daughter has experienced only the day camp, I'll confine my remarks to that program.

More like summer “school” than “camp”
The CTY day camp program can feel a lot like school to homeschoolers like us. First, there is the participation by “grade level.” Test results determine which classes are open to your child, according to grade level. Many relaxed homeschoolers and unschoolers avoid grade-level designations altogether, as we do. Grade levels can be especially perplexing with gifted kids, who tend to be asynchronous in their development, and perform at different levels in different subjects, with social development independent of any of them.

Choosing a grade level, therefore, should probably be customized for the individual child. I had my highly gifted daughter tested (on the SCAT) at what would have been her chronological grade level, without any grade skips, although all of her work was at a higher level. So far she has participated in classes intended for second- and third-graders, when she was chronologically a second-grader; and for third- and-fourth-graders, when she was chronologically a third-grader. These have worked out well for her. In the first year, the academic content was not overly challenging, but the “school skills” of handwriting and doing in-class assignments “on demand” were very hard for her. It was difficult for her to get in “school mode,” but it was probably a good experience, especially since she only had to do it for 3 weeks! This second year's camp has been challenging and highly enjoyable for her, and I think she was very appropriately placed.

Another way you know your child is in school, albeit a really fun and challenging one, rather than a recreational camp, is the location. CTY day camps are held at private school campuses in Maryland, Virginia, and California. The classrooms at the location my daughter attended, in Alexandria, Virginia, are traditional, with individual desks facing a blackboard and the teacher's desk.

Some basic school functions may be new experiences for young children who have always homeschooled. These include keeping all materials organized in backpacks, writing down and keeping track of homework assignments, bringing home communications for parents, writing legibly by hand, and so on. Children are given substantial homework to do each night and on the weekend.

A challenging experience
What's different from most schools is how challenging and engaging the homework and the day's activities are for gifted kids. My daughter loved the high-level reading, class discussions, and open-ended assignments in this summer's class, “Writing and Reading Workshop.” For example, after a week of reading and studying The Children's Homer, a book that includes the major storylines from both The Iliad and The Odyssey, the weekend homework assignment was “Create a board game on posterboard, based on Odysseus's travels.” It was fascinating to see the different ways kids interpreted and completed this assignment.

The work given in classes is often above-level, even for gifted kids. For example, one of the readings in my daughter's class of 9- and 10-year-olds was a chapter from Thoreau's Walden. This was extremely dense reading, and even with my help, it was tough going for my daughter. Then she had to write about his philosophy. That wasn't easy, either. With little perspective about how other kids were doing, I told my daughter it had to be difficult for them as well. I later found that it was; all of the kids found it to be the most difficult aspect of the class. Yet they all loved the “field trip activity” associated with it, a couple of nature hikes to a nearby wooded area in which they all chose a “plot of land” as Thoreau did. They wrote an essay and then a poem about their plots of land, and the ones I saw, in an anthology of work at the end of the class, were as wonderful as my daughter's.

My understanding is that this work and other such readings were chosen to help the kids learn how to read above-level material. They were taught to do “close” and “active” reading, consulting a dictionary for any unfamiliar words. I know that when my daughter reads, she customarily gets a general understanding of new words from context, then moves on, usually without even realizing she is doing so. Learning to stop and examine the full meaning of sophisticated vocabulary, in densely written philosophy such as Thoreau's, was a new and valuable experience for her.

My daughter found some of the writing, particularly essays, very difficult (the creative writing was extremely fun for her). With homework, especially, she sometimes struggled and spent as much as two hours working on one journal entry. “Writing is easy,” I told her. “You just open a vein and bleed.” My commiseration, as well as my editing suggestions, helped her a lot. I found myself continuing to be her homeschool teacher in helping her get through the homework. She was given a lot of excellent guidance on essay-writing by her teacher, especially concerning structure. My role was more in guiding her to write the way she talks, because she is extremely verbally articulate, but she would get hung up when trying to formulate sentences on paper. Her first essays would finally get done in the last quarter hour of two hours by my saying, “Tell me about such-and-such in a sentence or two” (verbally). She would then do so, in an excellent fashion. I would then say, “Okay, write that down.”

It was hard for me to know then exactly what level of work was expected of her. But in reviewing the anthology of students' work after the completion of the class, I now understand that she did just fine, an excellent job. It was even more difficult for her to know that she was doing a good job, because like many gifted kids, she is a perfectionist. This was despite comments from her teacher in her journal including “Excellent” and "Fantastic."

I saw her stretch in multiple ways during this camp. Besides her own class, she took note of exciting doings in other classes. One day she told me that next year, she must take another writing class. But two days later, she said that next year, she would like to take the “Science and Engineering” class, and told me about some of the things they were doing. And on the morning of the last day of camp, she said that the class she really wants to take next year is “Inventions,” and followed that with a description of that class's “Invention Convention” and the many cool things they had created.

Socially stimulating and enriching
Despite spending so much time on homework, and sometimes having doubts about her ability to do the writing required, my daughter was raring to get to camp each morning. Class began at 9 a.m., and the earliest you could drop kids off was 8:45 a.m. My daughter insisted that we get there by 8:45 a.m. each day, and considered 8:46 to be “late.” On the way to camp, she would chatter excitedly about all they would be doing that day. She was almost hyper, and she is not normally a hyper kid. “Exhilarated” is the word that would best describe her attitude. It was the same way when I picked her up in the afternoons, with her talking rapidly and enthusiastically.

This summer, it was interesting to see my daughter's abilities in relation to one of her friends from camp, whom she met in last year's class and stayed in touch with all year, through email. This girl, who attends a Catholic school, had sleepovers with my daughter on two “school nights” and the two girls worked on their homework together. I was impressed by the other girl's intelligence, organization, and study skills. It was heartwarming to see the two of them happily working on their homework together. This girl and other third- and fourth-graders in the class were excellent intellectual companions for my daughter.

I believe my daughter found the experience of being wrapped up in the same academic material with the other kids as compelling as any recess or lunchtime social interactions. Those leisure-time social interactions were thrilling to her as well. I heard comments from my daughter about five or six other children besides the girl she knew from last year. And she came home with a stack of orders from other kids for “pet rocks,” something she invented in one of her “worlds” here at home, one that she obviously shared with classmates at camp.

My daughter also loved her teacher, whom I believe is the first male teacher or camp counselor she has experienced. During the school year, he teaches high school English, and he told the kids in his class he was giving them the same material he gives his high school students. The Program Assistant, or PA, a college student, was also loved by my daughter and the other students.

On the last day of camp, there was an open house and presentation for parents. I took a group photo of the kids in my daughter's class with their teacher and PA. The looks on the faces of these kids are priceless. Every one of them is as exhilarated as my daughter, and they readily joined together, arm in arm. I said I would share my personal perspective here, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that all the kids in the class enjoyed the experience as much as my daughter did. I watched as one child after another gave the teacher a big goodbye hug. And after two days at home, the emails between kids have already begun.

What about the cost?
It is indeed a privilege to be able to send a child to an enriching summer camp like this one. The extra expense of travel and a short-term stay away from home makes the cost of the day camp experience comparable to the cost of the residential camp, and a bit more as well, which we think of as vacation expense. In fact, my daughter was able to swim in a pool almost every afternoon while we were at camp, both this year and last. That makes for a lot of summer fun, and her swimming ability improved a lot. We also explored museums and other venues in the area.

The main way we “justify” the expense is in thinking of it as part of our daughter's “private school tuition.” We think of ourselves as buying education “a la carte,” with a summer camp here, and an “extracurricular” or homeschool class there — along with a large collection of books, and lots of other adventures along the way. Our experience with CTY day camps is that they add something essential to our homeschool mix: my daughter's being with other gifted kids in an enriching, challenging atmosphere, with opportunities for group discussions and shared intellectual experience that we can't otherwise match. Now that is a value. (August 2006)

Jennifer Dees welcomes any comments or questions about this article at jdees@peregrine.net.  She writes about homeschooling her daughter on her blog at libertylyceum.blogspot.com

For more information:

Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth

CTY Talent Search and Testing

CTY Summer Programs