A little rain can’t get the camp down! We’ve had some awesome activities for the rain, including our mud challenge and creek stomping!
Last night, camp had Camplified visit! 3 bands rocked out in our Delaware building singing original works and covers. Afterwards, all of the campers were able to talk to the artists and get their autographs.
Here’s our fearless leader, Owen, dressed to the nines for the third annual Ms. Greenwood Trails Pageant.
Unfortunately, Owen didn’t win but he sure tried his hardest!
Last night was an awesome counselor hunt! Campers ran across camp, searching for counselors who were hiding everywhere! Here’s a picture of our master of Adventure, Mike, as he was found hiding in the rafters of the snack shack!
Today is very hot at GWT but we were able to cool down with a quick storm, which conveniently happened as the campers were getting their male counselors ready for Ms. Greenwood Trails (our evening event tonight).
Tonight, a new victor will be crowned in our third annual Ms. Greenwood Trails pageant! Who will the most talented male counselor be?!
B session has started off without a hitch! All campers are tasting our activities over the next two days so that majors can be chosen on Wednesday! Tonight, after we ate a delicious meal of ham, mashed potatoes, broccoli, and corn, we played an all camp version of pictionary!
Tomorrow is going to be HOT but so awesome!
Today is Sunday Funday! We slept in and ate delicious pastries for breakfast and now our cabins are hard at work on their Halloween costumes! Today’s schedule includes trick or treating, counselor relays, a pool party and a movie night.
We love relaxing schedules and man do we need it- we had a great social last night which was Mardis Gras themed and the night before was our campfire. Both were fun late nights and today, we’re laying back, dressing up, and enjoying each other’s company!
Tonight at Greenwood Trails, the CITs will be hosting their first social of the season with the theme Mardis Gras! Our counselors-in-training are in charge of decorations, snacks and music at our all-camp event and we’re excited to see what they have in store for us!
There was a flashmob at lunch today (lunch was grilled cheese and tomato soup… yum!). The flash mob was used to introduce the talent show that will be taking place on the upcoming week!
It’s a bit rainy here but that’s okay- rain can’t stop this camp from giving the campers a great day full of fun activities!
GWT wishes you all a very happy independence day!
It’s the third summer for Greenwood Trails! Over 100 kids are taking part in an awesome summer program this session and they couldn’t be happier!
So far, they’ve participated in all of our activities, a reverse scavenger hunt, and Number Games. Tomorrow, majors begin!
Check out our mygwt page for hundreds of pictures!
Today is the first day of summer 2012!! Campers will be all sorts of emotions today and our Greenwood Trails staff have been trained to handle all of them. Here’s an article about handling camp homesickness:
By: Jess Michaels, American Camp Association NY & NJ
School is out and your child is off to camp for a summer filled with swimming, sports, arts & crafts and learning important life skills such as leadership and independence. But what should you do if you receive a letter or a phone call from your child saying he or she is homesick? Don’t worry! Research indicates that it is common for campers to feel a tinge of homesickness at some point during the camp session.
The American Camp Association, New York and New Jersey offers parents the following tips to help their child handle homesickness at camp:
1. Do send a letter from home, acknowledging you will miss your child in a positive way. For example, the note can say, “I will miss you but I know you are going to have a wonderful time at camp.”
2. Do honor your child’s camp phone policy. If the camp has a no-phone call policy, honor it.
3. Don’t bribe. When writing or speaking to your child, don’t link a successful camp stay to a material object when your child returns home. This sends the wrong message. Your child’s independence and growth at camp is the reward.
4. Don’t plan an exit strategy. In correspondence with your child, don’t discuss plans to pick up your child early from camp if he/she doesn’t like it. If you receive a “rescue call” from your child while at camp, offer calm reassurance and put the time frame of camp into perspective.
5. Don’t feel guilty about encouraging your child to stay at camp. If your child wants to come home, don’t feel bad about encouraging your child to stay. For many children, camp is the first experience towards independence and it plays an important part in their growth and development.
6. Do talk candidly with the camp director. Talk to the camp director about his/her perspective on your child’s adjustment to camp. Remember, camp staff are trained to ease homesickness and have dealt with homesick children before.
Remember, extreme homesickness is rare and tends to pass quickly. Before you know it, your child will forget that he or she was ever homesick and will be writing home about all the fun they are having!
How to Set Aside Summer Learning Loss by Darrell Hammond, Huffington Post
Our kids are falling behind in their reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic and the solution, of course, is more school. Whether that takes the form of summer school or year-round school, we have come to believe that more indoor desk time is what our kids need to avoid the “summer slide.”
Really, kids need just the opposite. They need more outdoor play. They need to spend their summers moving, exploring and discovering — and not enough of them are getting a chance. Sadly, all too many children these days spend their summers sitting indoors in front of screens or getting rushed from math camp to soccer practice.
If there’s one thing that No Child Left Behind has proven, it’s that more academics don’t make for smarter children –or even higher test scores. And yet we somehow refuse to accept this reality. During the year, our schools are busy slashing P.E. and recess to make more time for math. During the summer, we get ourselves worked into a tizzy that our children will forget their fractions.
According to the National Summer Learning Association, while summer learning loss is real, “research on nature exposure, play and informal learning has also documented the good news” — that programs filled with outdoor play “have an opportunity to stem and even reverse summer learning loss.”
Here’s a question for you: Should we really care if our kids need a refresher on fractions come September? What if instead of sitting around indoors, our children spent the summer exercising their creativity and imagination, honing their social skills, developing resiliency, gaining the ability to assess risk and learning how to share, negotiate, resolve conflicts and advocate for themselves? Would you, as a parent, argue with that?
Well, those are all the benefits and skills a child gains by cloud-gazing, tree-climbing, playground-going and handstand-mastering — in short, by engaging in that frivolous, non-academic activity we call “playing.”
This summer, we need to let our kids go play and we need to stop worrying about whether or not it’s going to ruin their chances of getting into college. (It won’t.) They can also read, practice soccer drills and even do a few math problems, but not at the expense of a good water fight or vigorous game of tag.
As parents, we need to send our kids back to “old-fashioned” outdoor summer camps, which have been on the decline as the demand for sports and academics-based camps has risen. We need to fight budget cuts to public parks programs and resist closures of public swimming pools and playgrounds. We need to introduce ourselves to our neighbors so our kids aren’t drawing hopscotch courses on the sidewalk alone.
And while we’re working on all this, there’s one thing we can act on now. We can set aside the laundry, put down our smartphones, turn off the TV and take our kids out to play.
