Summer Camp!

For the past seven weeks, this being the eighth week, I have worked at a day camp. I work from 8:30 to 5 everyday, which basically means I am running around with small children for most of that time, and am exhausted by the end of the day. The camp is for kids ages 5-12, which is a HUGE range. In the beginning I worked mostly with the five and six year olds, but lately my director has been encouraging us to work with different ages each day in order to keep each of us sane. I have still been working with the younger ones quite a bit though to prepare myself for student teaching in a kindergarten class in the fall! It's crazy that some of the kids in camp have not been to kindergarten yet, and some are about to enter middle school. It works well to split all of this craziness up a lot of the time because surprisingly 12-year olds and 5-year olds do not always mix well. Sometimes the older kids get creepy, long story short. I think the best way to organize this post will be by weeks of camp since we have had a different theme to lead us each week.

Week 1: Vermont Week

This first week was filled with nature walks, tie-dye t-shirts, cows, vermont trivia, and many vermont coloring sheets. One of the first things we did was have the campers decorate two giant cows. Needless to say, they turned out pretty unique. This week was probably one of the most hectic, even though they are all hectic in their own way. The camp has a confusing schedule since there are different counselors in the mornings and afternoons, and only three of us stay the whole day. There are also some campers that stay for the whole day, and some that just come for the morning or afternoon sessions. ANYWAY,  that's probably not that interesting for any of you. I also do not remember much from this week, so I will move on.

Week 2: Superhero/Patriotic Week

This week was originally just superhero week, but when we realized it was the same week as the fourth of July, we decided to mix this with a red, white, and blue patriotic week. This actually worked out pretty well because we included local superheroes in our week, which included a visit from the police and fire departments of the city. This week was also great because we had wednesday off for the fourth of July! It was a nice break in the middle of the week, even though it would have made more sense to have a three day weekend somewhere in there. I was sad that I wasn't able to go home for the day, but I did visit the next weekend to get a little fix of southern vermont Fourth of July festivities. At camp, we also had dress up as a superhero day on friday, in which I went as "Super Counselor" wearing a cape that I made earlier in the week. I think one of the most memorable costumes was "Super Monkey," brought to you by a camper that love monkeys. This week also contributed to my continued hate of glitter in children's crafts, and always for that matter. We made sparkling glitter masks, and fireworks displays on black construction paper, and let me tell you..glitter is THE WORST to clean up. The things we sacrifice for these kids...

Week 3: Animal Week

It took me a while to remember the theme to this week even though I am fond of the animals, and the animal weeks. An exciting part of this week was when I led the whole camp in various animals songs. There are a surprising amount of songs about animals, but it is difficult to find ones that all of the campers will know the lyrics to, or that I will know the lyrics to for that matter. Baby shark was a hit as always, even though I only went up to the verse about grandma and grandpa shark, and decided to spare the kids by not teaching them the verses which describe the shark attack. We also had a water day this week, which was the same for most of the other weeks too, especially when there was a really hot day right smack dab in the middle of the week.  We came up with a game that involved asking animal related questions and letting campers dump water on the counselors if they answered a question right. If they did not know the answer, we would dump water on them. We did this for superhero week as well. I do not know very much about superheroes, which led to me getting pretty wet. Should have brought a change of clothes...


Week 4: Space Week

Space week involved playing many of the same games that most of the campers already knew, but switching the names of the games to make them relate to space. We would also change some of the content of the game, but when the campers would say "this is just like -----," we would assure them that it was NOTHING like that game, and a completely different game. (Lies) Anyway, we continued to do this for all of the other theme weeks as well. Needless to say, most of the kids caught on to our trickery. Speaking of games, I would just like to say that I have learned SO MANY GAMES this summer. It is great, because I am sure I will use many of them in my future as a teacher. Maybe not the ones that involve lots of running around and tagging, but still a bunch of them. I have started a list of all of the random games I know to use a reference tool when I am trying to think of something to play with my students. I also realized that my knowledge of space does not go much further than what I learned from my dad watching Apollo 13 repetitively during my childhood, plus the names of the planets. Oh! and the musical Even Stevens episode with the "We went to the moon in 1969..." song. Yep, I think that's about it.

Also during the fourth week of camp, we had a "midsummer training" for two hours after camp...at a bowling alley. This involved the director of the camps talking at us for a while about things we had written down about how camp was going so far, and then they provided us with one free game of bowling. The actual training wasn't super useful but the highlight of my night was bowling the best game ever. For me, that was a score of something around 154. You can tell me if that is actually good or not, but I know I got a lot of strikes and spares and impressed my fellow counselors. Or maybe they just thought I was weird for being good at bowling? I'll never know...

Week 5: Disney Week

Disney week was great. We watching Toy Story 1 and 2 during the course of the week, and we went on a field trip to get ice cream one of the mornings. We sang and listened to a lot of disney songs, and played freeze dance and musical dots to different disney songs. We also had a costume parade at the end of the week. One six-year-old wore a Winnie the Pooh costume, which was clearly made for his 3-year-old self. So that was pretty amusing. Also, a five-year-old Jack Sparrow was pretty adorable. I put on a tiara and we paraded around the field for no one in particular.


Week 6: Olympic Week

Olympic week put me into shape more than any of the other weeks of camp. We played a lot of games every week of camp, but this week was definitely more active than any other. I started to become more competitive, especially when we split up into different countries to compete in olympic games. Interestingly enough, the four countries the campers chose were Italy, USA, China, and South Africa. South Africa won the whole olympics. My favorite event of this week was playing volleyball with a beach ball, campers against four counselors. We dominated, obviously. We got way too competitive, even though it was four twenty-something-year-olds against 8-11 year olds. At least it wasn't the five and six-year-olds, right? The counselors also finally decided to participate in the slip-n-slide this week, which I did not regret at all. Even when I was so wet that I made a puddle underneath myself on the cafeteria floor. Ironically, this was the same day that two campers peed themselves on the slip-n-slide.

Week 7: Carnival/Circus Week

Even though this was the second to last week of camp, we seemed to have more new campers than ever on Monday. I guess families had arrived back from vacations and were already sick of their children. We did not end up doing too many carnival related activities until the last day of the week that involved face painting, balloon animals, and many carnival games in the gym since it was raining outside. Also on this rainy day, we watching Dumbo, which I do not think I have done since I was five. I could not pay attention fully since most of the counselors were multi-tasking and planning other activities for the afternoon, so I should probably re-watch it sometime since it is sitting on the shelf in my living room. I probably won't actually do that ever though.

We had another ice cream field trip this week, which was great. We also went to the local high school for a musical performance from "Mister G." Apparently he has been nominated for a grammy? He's better live than recorded, so try not to judge if you look him up.

Another highlight of this week (I use the word highlight very loosely), was when a girl came up to me and said "I just did a little poop in my pants..." I think this gave me a little sneak peek of what I will be dealing with a lot in a kindergarten classroom. She explained to me how she "just didn't know how it happened." At least she was cute about it... Since then I have dealt with another child peeing themselves. I'd rather have to deal with number 1 than number 2...if ya know what I mean. So yeah, that's that. Yay 5-year-olds!

Week 8: Water Week

Water is the current and final week of camp. It worked out well that this was the last week of camp because also this week we lost three of the four spaces that we normally use in the school. So we basically just have the gym and outside to use for camp. We have been trying to be outside as much as possible, even though the weather has not been completely ideal. I think it is supposed to rain tomorrow, so we might have to watch a movie. It will be Muppet Treasure Island though, so water themed. We have been playing water games outside and using the slip-n-slide and sprinkler quite a bit. We have also played pirate games such as shipwreck (great game), and today we did a treasure hunt, which the kids seemed to really enjoy. One quote that I will remember from this week was from a six-year-old wearing a bikini. She came up to me and said "Look! I'm wearing a bikini! I like it because it shows my tummy." Classic six-year-old... This week has made me hate transition time even more, when it takes what seems like hours for the campers to change into their bathing suits and put on sunscreen. I will not miss that once winter rolls around.

Well, I think this blog is just long enough. I am sure I am forgetting a lot but this is all I have the energy for at the moment, and I want to finish it before water week is actually over! Hope you've enjoyed my ramblings!