The Mountain Laurel is in full bloom around Wolfe Lake as our summer staff arrives! We have started Lifeguard training for our new counselors, and Senior counselors have arrived for a special leadership orientation. All staff will be here on June 9th when orientation officially begins. We are so excited for summer, and camp preparations are in full swing. The water slide is getting its final gel coat so it will be ready for its official grand opening on June 20th! Currently, we are upgrading the Riflery Range, finishing some Putt – Putt holes and building one more porch in Girl’s World. We are eager to show off all the great work Nick, Tom, Alaska and many others have done in excited preparation for our campers arrival!
Inside the Camp Pinnacle kitchen the food has never been better. You will love getting to know Mike and Richard our two new chefs who are busy preparing delicious menus for our up and coming summer.
As we put the finishing touches on orientation, we thought we would share what we have been reading this winter. It’s our job to stay on top of the latest youth development thinking and trends so we can make sure that the Camp Pinnacle program remains relevant to parents and serves as a stepping stone to our campers success. Topics from these books will be featured in our instructor orientation sessions as we try to facilitate the best possible learning and growing summer camp experience for your child. You can see the books we recommended last year (which still have a large place in our program) by clicking here.
These are our suggestions for worthwhile reading (if you share our obsession for positive youth development!):
Teach Your Children Well by Madeline Levine is the best parenting book I have read. It offers lots of practical tips and a wonderful perspective. Levine includes recent research to support her points that good grades, high test scores and elite college acceptances are not the endgame we as parents should strive for. Her focus on raising a good kid vs. raising a smart kid will be one of our themes for orientation at both Camp Pinnacle and Adventure Treks. More than child development, Levine really focuses on parental development and offers a clear voice on parenting for authentic success. Levine brings great perspective as well has helpful and practical tips from 30 years of clinical experience as a psychologist and her own parenting exploits.
In the Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness, Edward Hallowell gives us a wonderful five step program we can keep in mind as we give our kids a childhood that will create a footprint for them to be happy adults. According to Hallowell, childhood should provide opportunities to feel connected to others, to play and be joyful, to practice and attain mastery, to fail and build resilience and to receive recognition. Hallowell is a huge advocate of keeping childhood as a special time where kids live less pressure filled lives than most currently do. This book is well written, easy to digest, and a huge help to all parents combatting the world of competitive parenting.
In How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter most have more to do with character development than academics and testing. How Children Succeed introduces us to a new generation of researchers and educators who, for the first time, are using the tools of science to peel back the mysteries of character. Whereas IQ is hardly malleable, executive function and character strengths – specifically grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity and conscientiousness – are far more malleable. Tough posits that these skills are better predictors of academic performance and educational achievement than IQ and therefore ought to be the direct target of interventions.
Coming Apart by Charles Murray is the most powerful book I have read this year. I first discovered this book when an excerpt was published in the Wall Street Journal as a Saturday feature. The excerpt alone created fodder for hours of discussion. I found that the book covered much more ground than ever expected. This book is an invaluable tool towards understanding modern American society and the tremendous divergence we are currently seeing. Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Charles Murray demonstrates that a new upper and educated class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship. This divergence has grown during good economic times and bad. Murray argues that the powerful upper class, living in enclaves or Super Zips surrounded by similar folks is completely removed with life in mainstream America. Meanwhile the lower class is suffering from erosions of family and community life that is unprecedented in our 200 year history. This divergence puts the success of our country at risk. This is a tremendous sequel to Robert Putnam’s fabulous work, Bowling Alone – the Collapse and Revival of American Community.