Children and Teens at Camp

Residential overnight summer camps also provide a unique opportunity for children to interact with others both older and younger than they. At a girls camp like Rockbrook, younger girls benefit from seeing older girls interact and do so many challenging things (“Wow, she can do it!”), and our teenage campers learn important leadership skills helping the younger girls accomplish things at camp (“Here, let me help you get started with that.”). With girls of all ages living together and doing so much together, it’s neat to see how everyone can grow from the experience.

Outdoor Kids Activities

Do you see the tiny bug on her finger? When you come to summer camp and spend so much time outdoors, you can bet you’ll run into some kind of cool spider, fly, ant, caterpillar, moth or butterfly just about every day. It’s almost an activity by itself— finding and learning about all of the different insects out there in the woods at camp. Some are little “creepy” looking (like these stink bugs !), and some you might not want to pick up (like this one we’ve spotted at camp before), but most are really interesting and neat to see.

Crossword Puzzle Answers!

The wait is over! Here are the answers to the Rockbrook Camp crossword puzzle we published in last month’s newsletter. Congratulations if you got everything correct, and even if you didn’t, we hope you had fun working on the puzzle and thinking about camp.

Kids Outdoor Activities

Hey we’re kids, and we’re ready for camp! We want to play outdoors this summer, dress like a goof ball, and run around trying new activities with our friends. How much longer do we have to wait? Well, once school is out, it won’t be long. In fact, you can see the exact amount of time left before camp opens over on the sidebar. Check out the “Camp Countdown” on the right.

This photo is from “Jug Band” night.

A Place to Grow

In her book, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, Wendy Mogel critiques what she sees as a troubling trend in parenting these days— an excessive tendency to shield children from any kind of discomfort.

“Parents are so busy protecting their children that they don’t give them a chance to learn how to maneuver on their own outside home or school.”

Spending time at summer camp serves as a welcome counter force to this trend. As they choose their own activities, sleep in rustic cabins, live with and make new friends, young people at camp are given a great opportunity to grow. Far beyond what parents might orchestrate at home, camp encourages kids to become more independent, to try new things, and to learn from the experience.

It’s a lot of things (like a really fun time!), but perhaps most fundamentally, camp is a setting for exploring who we really are.  Stepping out of our normal routines, we can try new things, endure discomforts and setbacks (try again), and marvel at unexpected accomplishments.

Nature-Deficit Disorder

In his recent book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv talks about summer camp serving as a healthy response to our modern tendency to be “plugged in” (to electronic media) and “in motion” (between school, lessons, sports practice, etc.). He writes, “as the young spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow— physiologically and psychologically. This reduces the richness of human experience.”

At the same time, there’s something magical about the sort of sustained exposure to nature camps provide. Louv sites an amazing array of studies linking nature experience and healthy child development, and concludes “I believe that offering children direct contact with nature— getting their feet wet and hands muddy— should be at the top of the list of vital camp experiences.”