Everybody loves camping. It is a super opportunity to learn, promote love and respect nature. Kids pack their sleeping bags, tents, flashlights among other belongings for campers to go for a three-day, two-night camping in a beautiful and natural place in Nicaragua. The journey is splitted by ages: first and second graders go together and third grade goes as a team with fourth and fifth graders.
Ara Macao Camping Curie is learning from the open book of nature where students experience how an ecosystem interacts with its living organisms; they alsodevelop their socio emotional skills by sharing with classmates, teachers and local people activities done in that area everyday life.Our elementary school students enjoy their camping by the first weeks of February.
Unique in our country. All our classrooms are designed with beautiful gardens, which make students keep a direct contact with nature everyday they come to school. It is an open area where students may grow their own plants and flowers. Each class is to clean water and take care of their green area. It is also a space where students may run science experiments or observations.
Everything starts with a festival of Curie-osities in which students try to find out how something works or why a phenomenon happens and then they share their findings with their class. After that they make teams to choose their topics and build their hypothesis to begin their research process and then test their experiments or make their observations to present their results to the Curie community.
Students have an internal fair in which the winner teams from the last fair, play the role of a judge and have the opportunity to make questions and learn from other projects. Projects are presented in wooden displays with information handmade by the members of each team. This final day, students present their projects to judges that are chosen by the general coordination of our science fair. It is a day to share new learnings among parents, students and teachers.
Students, families and teachers love these sessions. They are scheduled by the end of January and the beginning of February when we have clear skies in Nicaragua. All the attendants have the opportunity to see an astronomic phenomenon using the school mega telescope placed in our Observatory Neil Armstrong. Some families bring their own telescope to use and share too.
We also have a short lecture presented by our physics teachers, a member of the Association of Amateur Astronomers or our scientist Mr. Jaime Incer Barquero who usually share these amazing nights with our Curie community.
