
Four buses of excited campers rolled into camp around 9:30 this morning. We got them all checked into their tents and unpacked. Then we spent the morning with the campers playing name games and ice-breaker games so that all the campers can get to know each other. The morning ended with a big lunch of spaghetti and quesadillas, which are always a popular meal.
After lunch, the campers started in on their regular activity rotations. We have four activity periods per day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. The teams had the following schedules in the afternoon.
Red team: Giant Swing and sports
Pink team: sports and crafts
Light Blue team: crafts and river tracing
Orange team: ecology and Giant Swing
Green team: river tracing and ecology
If you want to know more about these activities, you can see a description here. Some of the activities vary from week to week and year to year so that people who attend more than one session have some variety. For sports, we make a point of playing games that the campers probably haven't played before. That gives everyone a fair chance. This week, we played Pillow Polo. It is a little bit like hockey, in that the object of the game is to get a ball in a goal. But it is played with padded sticks and a soft foam ball. It's a lot of running and a lot of fun.

For crafts, we are making "shrinky-dinks." These are a fun and creative project. You start with a sheet of plastic film similar to the type used for laminating. The film is roughed up with fine sandpaper, which makes it so that it can be drawn on with permanent marker. It is them put in an oven for a few minutes causing it to shrink down into a hard piece of plastic about 1/6 the size of the original sheet.
We had great weather throughout the day, right up till half way through our last activity period. Then we got a light rain. The rain got a bit heavier during the shower hour.
The rain seems to have let up for now. The campers are just finishing their dinner and are preparing for the evening campfire.
Photos:
Below, you will find a Dropbox link to photos of your campers. You are probably wondering how to find pictures of your precious ones. If you don't remember their team color from this morning, start by looking through the "tent pictures" folder. When you find your child notice the color of the lanyard holding their name tag. You can then look in the folder with that team color for further pictures. For example in the picture at the top of this post, everyone in front of the tent is wearing a purple lanyard, so if one of them is your child, you would look in the "Purple Team" folder for more pictures.
A note about photos. We give each team a camera with which to take photos during activities. They try their best to get good photos, but their first priority is managing the campers to be sure everyone is being safe and having fun. It is also important to remember that children act differently when being photographed. Some children turn to the camera and smile for a photo, while others turn away and hide their faces. We will take as many photos as we can and try our best to get photos of everyone's children, but we ask for your understanding if there are more or less photos of your child on a given day.
Link to photos. (This link should allow you to view and download pictures without any further access or sign-in required.)