A highly successful Great Valley Writing Camp helped local youngsters wrap up the summer, getting in some creative writing while having fun on the Dent Elementary campus.

There were two separate groups, with the older students deciding on some specific topics to focus on with their writing and the younger group highlighting gardens and the creatures often found in them.

Camp Director Sally Hale said there was a great teacher to student ratio this year and everyone seemed to enjoy the camp activities.

There were 13 students in the younger group, starting with kindergarten up through third grade; five students in the older group, which went up through seventh grade, along with three high school assistants and several teachers.

“It went fabulously,” Hale said.

The younger group focused on Garden: Friends and Foe.

“They studied and determined whether anything, whatever they found in the garden, whatever they were presented, is this a friend or a foe and some are both, they discovered,” Hale explained. “The other (older) group, they chose a theme and did a multi-genre project.”

A couple of students chose the Titanic as their project, she said, with one focusing on the ship itself and the other doing a biographical study of Margaret ‘Molly’ Brown.

“She was one of the few known survivors that really made a name for herself,” said Hale.

Another student in the older age group focused on camping, one did art and there was also a feature on Wyoming.

Brodie Peeler, 12, who will be going into sixth grade, did his project on camping, rating several different campsites in California on a number of categories. He used a five-star system and his top-rated campsite was Buckhorn, in Lake County, coming in at 4.7 on the rating system.

“I like mainly that we got to write every day,” he said, adding that he also enjoyed sharing the work with the other students.

Aubree Webster, 10, chose to do a biographical report on Margaret Brown, better known as ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown’, a survivor on the ill-fated Titanic.

“She was really heroic and she helped a lot of people,” the young writer said of her subject, as Brown assisted many passengers to the lifeboats. “It’s all really interesting and I liked that we didn’t just write essays, we had fun.”

Through it all, there was a common theme.

“Confidence,” Hale said of what the students gain the most from being immersed in the writing camp. “One of the big things I think is the sense of confidence ... and voice; voice is so important and a lot of times in education, we take it out and this is a place for them to establish it young and not lose it.”

Teacher Nate Caton was involved for the first time, working with the younger students.

“What I’m impressed with the most about the program is how they integrate things that are not school related, for instance this year they did garden and they learned about plants and insects and they were able to integrate that with their writing,” Caton said. “I always say it, as a teacher and as a coach, I just like working with the kids, you get that bond with them and it’s always a great feeling to have.”

Caton added that the creativity was amazing and the kids understood how much fun they could have learning.

Former Writing Camp participant, Isabella Grant, returned this summer as a high school helper. She will be a junior at EHS this year.

“I remember having a lot of fun being a camper so I always knew, if Sally (Hale) wanted me back that I’d come back and help out in any way that I could,” she said. “I worked on the website, mainly taking pictures of everyone and what they were doing. It was more fun to kind of go to that ‘behind the scenes’ stuff whereas, as a kid you just come in and do the work; as a part of the staff you get to see how everything was fit together.”

Hale added that students learned by sometimes using ‘mentor text’ which helped provide a framework for whatever they were working on, and for the older students, she said offering the ability to be creative was key.

“The kids in the upper room also learned that you don’t have to write a report to give out information,” she explained. “Information can be given in a lot of different forms.”