The school year ended in mid-June, but Mommy and Daddy still had to work. Trying to work with Nyan around isn’t really all that conducive to actually, you know, getting anything done. So what to do? Send him to camp!

Nyan’s too young for any sort of overnight camp (if such a thing even exists in Singapore), but there are lots and lots and LOTS of day camps available, covering everything from language to sports to cooking to technology to flying airplanes (no, really. But only for older kids). So in between various travels, we signed Nyan up for a bunch of week-long all-day camps on topics including Mandarin, science, computer coding and math. The camps were a combination of fun and learning, which is perfect for our boy, who loves learning but is still a little boy who loves to have fun.

First up was a week of Mandarin at the mall down the road, to brush up on his Chinese. We think it was a success; he definitely had fun. Here’s Nyan and some of his camp-mates, burning off steam outside the learning center after a day of instruction.

To celebrate a job well done, on a couple days Daddy took Nyan to an indoor toy/play space in the same mall to play for a while. Nyan loved it.

Walking to the play place:

Playing with cars and trains:

Another day, we visited a trampoline-play place they had set up temporarily in the lobby of the mall. Nyan was joined by a couple of classmates. 

Nyan was especially fond of his camp-mate Isabel, a girl a year younger, to the point where they insisted on a playdate the weekend after camp. Here they are, at camp and at play (including feeding Isabel’s baby sister):

He also spent time at a place called Camp Asia, which offered the rest of the courses.  It was at a school campus a few miles from home, and each morning they sent a big bus to collect Nyan and dozens of other kids from around the neighborhood. Each afternoon, the same bus dropped them off. 

His first week at Camp Asia was Science Camp. Jayden was in the same class, and the two young scientists learned about magnets, chemistry, astronomy and more. Here’s the activity book Nyan brought home after a day of learning about physics.

Finally: We were a little worried that he might not be that into Mandarin camp. That wasn’t the case, as you can see from all the fun he was having at the end of the day. But he was also in a very cheery mood on his way there, bright and early each morning. Check it:

More on Camp Asia in a future post…