In a bright, spacious classroom at a community center in Pudong New Area, a teacher reads a fairy tale to a group of children. From time to time, the youngsters burst with laughter as their teacher uses humorous voices and gestures to acts out the story.

This is just a single activity in one of the 47 month-long summer classes organized in Pudong for local children, some of who might otherwise spend their summer days alone.

The classes are subsidized by the local government and parents pay 500 yuan (US$78.13) for each three-week session. This price includes food, activity fees, insurance and other expenses.

“Every year, when summer vacation is around the corner, I start to get worried. My husband and I have to work and our parents don’t live in Shanghai. Last year I found summer classes for my son in a private institution, which cost me nearly 10,000 yuan,” Emily Wang, the mother of a 9-year-old, tells Shanghai Daily.

For Wang, the subsidized summer classes ease both her mind and her family’s childcare burden.

“The program has a good variety of classes and activities. My son gets to make some new friends in the same community. Plus the summer class really helps to save some money for me,” she adds.

But the camps are about more than just having fun. They also help the students learn and stay stimulated throughout their summer holiday.

Based on requirements from the Communist Youth League of Shanghai’s organization department, there are 243 summer classes happening across Shanghai with specified and optional subjects. These specified subjects include Chinese traditional culture, etiquette and schoolwork tutoring.

Meanwhile, participating communities are also finding subjects of their own to enrich local children. At a community in the Zhangjiang area of Pudong, student volunteers from the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine impart basic medical and scientific knowledge.

The community has also welcomed ten foreign volunteers from six different countries — including Canada, the US and Russia — to interact with the children and cultivate their creativity.

Cade Underwood, a 21-year-old exchange student at Donghua University, says he enjoys his time with the children in Zhangjiang.

“I’ve already had some experience working with children in a summer camp in the United States, so this is a really good fit for my experience. It was what I was looking for and also it was a very good opportunity for me to practice my Chinese,” he says.

Underwood communicates with the students mostly in Chinese. When they are not playing, they talk about their homes and cultural differences between China and the US.

In one activity, which he’s also done with summer campers in the US, Underwood has the children draw their homes. They are also encouraged to draw their families, friends, toys or other objects that represent their homes.

“The Chinese kids here had a very difficult time thinking about their home in an abstract sense. In the US, the kids don’t have that difficulty,” he says. In his view, opportunities to be creative are in short supply for most Chinese children.

“But at the same time, their drawings are much better, much more mature than the ones I saw in the United States. ... Chinese kids are less creative but they are more skilled,” he adds.