Summer Plans!

This summer, my kids are going to Camp Half-Blood.

If you're not familiar with the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, they're a wonderful series of fantasy/adventure books aimed at fifth through ninth graders. Percy Jackson, a hero in the classical Greek sense of the word, is a demigod son of Poseidon and the object of a powerful prophecy. Following him through the five-book series, you not only get to see him grow from a 12-year-old to a 16-year-old, but also learn a ton about Greek mythology along the way.

There are a lot of similarities between this series and the Harry Potter books, another favorite at our house. So much so, that when listening to the audio book, my five-year-old Nicholas kept exclaiming "Percy is just like Harry Potter!" and "Hey, that happened in Harry Potter, too!"

Much as we did Hogwart's Summer School a couple years ago, we'll be exploring Camp Half-Blood this summer. Some resources we'll be using as we plan include:
Camp Half-Blood Blog
Book People Camp
Rick Riordan's Camp Half-Blood site, including a schedule here
Some PDFs from Hyperion Books
A camp application
Making This Up as I Go did their own version
A message board version of the camp
A Camp Half-Blood role playing game
Rick Riordan's blog
The official site

Some more ideas garnered from this thread at MDC:
School Down the Lane had a Greek Festival
The Cronus Chronicles was another recommended series
Odds Bodkins has a recording of the Odyssey

And this thread has some great suggestions for reading The Odyssey to kids

As we wrap up our school year, we're going to look at the twelve Olympians and learn more about them. I'd like the kids to use shoeboxes to make camp cabins for each god. Then, of course, we also need to pick up orange shirts to make official Camp Half-Blood t-shirts.

More updates coming!