Today was our first field trip, to Severance Hall and a rehearsal from the Cleveland Orchestra. Just one of those things you can't tell a young person to appreciate, the opportunity to see a world-famous symphonic orchestra in their shorts, getting things wrong for an hour (I mean, that's what rehearsal is for, right?) but not that we didn't try. It is my hope that years from now they will look back and understand they got to see something most people never do.

An off-site field trip can take up most of the day, and we did get back a half hour later than usual for lunch. After, the campers worked on thank you notes for the orchestra, and then we tried something different - an elective afternoon session.

On Thursday we put up a sign-up sheet, where students could sign up for whichever discipline they chose. The only rules were that there could be more more than 12 in any class, and that everyone had to sign up for something. It should not have surprised me that I got one student signing up for writing. Bobby announced that people could bring in their own guitars and his class filled up fast, and everyone loves working with Tim.

My session was very successful, I had one boy who really wanted to work on a story about the time he was bit by his aunt's dog (conflict - man vs. nature.) I interviewed him, asked him to take notes on the details he was bringing out and we put together a plot and a solid beginning, middle and end.

I am really looking forward to next week, each camper is in a different place with his or her writing - I looked at every one of their journals this week and gave everyone notes on how to proceed.