15+ Camp Themes and Activities

Dear Friends and Readers,

It’s that time of year, and we are all gearing up for a few months of Summer Camp Glory. If you are like me and have yet to plan activities for each of your wonderful themes, then this post is for you. Here is my list of 15 summer camp themes and corresponding activities. More will be added to the list in the future.

Camp Themes

1. An Indiana Jones Adventure
2. Around the World 
3. Club Hollywood with the activities Survivor and The Amazing Race and Movie Day
4. Harry Potter Day
5. It’s A Jungle Out There
6. MLK: Community Service Program with the activity LIFE
7. More Than Conquerers
8. Mud Pie
9. Mystery Day Camp with the activity Clue
10. Mystery Day Event (Preteen Girls)
11. Ocean Commotion
12. Outside the Box with the activities Safari Dodgeball, Big Taboo and Movie Day
13. Pirates Versus Ninjas Day
14. Summer Olympics
15. Super Hero Day

What camp themes have you found successful? 

~Miss Brenda

Mystery Day: Camp Theme

Dear Friends and Readers,

In every child, there is a small detective just DYING to come out. Who is the bathroom vandal at the BGC? What just made that noise? What happens when I try opening my juice box with my teeth? Kids want to learn and know and investigate.

What better camp theme than to take that innate urge and run with it? Kids LOVED “Mystery Day” and I can’t wait to repeat it!

Here is what we did for our “Mystery Day” camp theme:

•  “Decoding Drawings” 
  • One staff sat on one side of a field and drew a picture slowly.
  • Members were divided into teams, and one at a time ran across to where the staff was drawing.
  • The “runner” looked at the drawing, ran back and drew what they saw.
  • This continued until members guessed what the staff was drawing.
  • Variation: staff just draws a pattern and the game ends when all kids have run there and back. Whoever has the closest drawing wins.
• “Riddle Relays”
  • Staff come up with an object, phrase or action that kids have to guess. They also create a list of corresponding clues.
  • Kids are divided into teams and run relay style to one side of the field, obtain a clue and run back.
  • Teams continue to collect more clues until they have a guess.
  • When ready to make a guess, teams send the next runner to the staff with the answer. Teams that guess forfeit their right to a clue that turn (this helps stop kids from guessing randomly).
• “Private Eye Lessons”
  • Kids practiced skills needed to be a detective! Skills included:
  • Gadgets and Dress: Members divided into teams and competed to create the best detective outfits and gear.
  • Refining Your Senses: Members had to discover objects while blindfolded using only their senses of smell, hearing and feeling.
  • Being Sneaky: One staff was blindfolded while another managed the group. Kids had to tiptoe around the room without making noise. If the blindfolded staff was able to point to where they heard someone, that child was out.
• “Life Size Clue” Who stole Miss Brenda’s Birthday Cake?!
  • Kids gathered at the BGCPD to be briefed on perhaps the most heinous crime of the century: the case of the stolen birthday cake.
  • Kids were divided into groups according to age, each with a staff to guide them, and worked together to find/piece together clues.
  • Kids were given an initial dossier & a logic problem. They used that, along with clues found throughout the club, to figure out which staff stole and ate the cake, where they ate it, and what utensil they used to eat it.

I will be uploading the details and printables for Life Size Clue within the next few days. Keep your eyes open! It took FOREVER to create, but was completely worth it. Hopefully it will involve less prep time the second time around!

What have you done for a mystery theme or activity?

~Miss Brenda

Summer Olympics: Camp Theme

Dear Friends and Readers,

Personally, I am more of a winter olympics kind of girl. Figure skating + snowboarding + speed skating + bobsledding + curling + any and every skiing event ever = one very excited Miss Brenda. Gymnastics, track and field, beach volleyball? A mildly interested Miss Brenda.

Unfortunately, “summer” camp in the exotic terrain of our country’s farmland is not exactly the place to experience downhill skiing with campers. Not at all. So we adjust and celebrate summer olympics instead…

Last year, we started off the summer with a Summer Olympics themed week to have a looser, more active week to jump-start the summer and adapt to the exhausted, brain-dead state of our campers who are just out of school for the year. Here are things that we did:

• Making Flags. Each team (cabin) choose team colors and tye dyed individual and team flags. Sidenote: tye dying is a camp tradition, but is by far my least favorite camp activity ever. So much work for so little fun…
• Olympic Ring Scavenger Hunt. Each team had a camera and ran around the club/went outside to find as many different ways as they could to make olympic rings. Colors didn’t have to match, but they needed to be three circles (or other shapes) on bottom and two on top. Kids made them with marbles and boxes and juice cups and crayons and leaves… They had to take pictures of them and share with the group.
• Quick Tournaments. We had “indoor olympics” one day, “outdoor olympics” another and “water olympics” on a hot day. This was just a bunch of quick, fun games with few instructions that kids could compete individually and in teams. We kept track of records and gave out “Boom Shaka Laka”s to winners.
• Discus Throw. Kids colored and stapled paper plates together to create a discus/frisbee and then competed within their teams to see how far they could throw them.
• Curling. In the hallway, we taped a poster board to the floor that had a target painted on it. We started at the opposite end of the hallway and used dodge balls for the stone. Kids rolled the ball and then ran along side it blowing on the ball to make it go faster/slower and have it stop on the target. Kids got VERY into this and we repeated it a few times later in the week.
• Guest Speaker. One of my coworkers’ step mom is a former olympic athlete and came in to speak to the kids. They LOVED it, as did our counselors who got to sit back and relax for a while.

In the afternoon, our camp becomes open to all members of the B&G Club and is less structured. Some of our optional activities during Olympics week in the afternoon were watching Cool Runnings, repeating some of our olympic games, making olympic torches and medals in the art room, and learning colors and sports in Spanish club.

This year, our Olympics themed week is scheduled for the first week of the 2012 games. We are calling our theme “Olympic Village 2012″ and are blending a sports week with an “around the world” multicultural week. I can’t wait to whip out my horrendous fake British accent.

How are you planning to celebrate the Olympics this year at camp? 

~Miss Brenda

The Power of the Parachute

Dear Friends and Readers,

Sometimes, one word acts as a miracle all on its own. When working with kids, that one word is parachute, as in, it is time to play with the PARACHUTE! I remember loving the one day a year that we got to use the parachute in gym class as I was growing up. In the years since then, the power of the parachute has not faded.

When I was in college, a few friends and myself went to Romania to volunteer with children. In our limited space to pack our things and donations for the missionaries we stayed with, we made sure to make room for a parachute. And the kids loved it!

When I worked at the YMCA preschool camp, we brought out the parachute one day mid summer. It made at least a weekly appearance from then on for the rest of the summer.

Here are some games that we have played with the parachute:

• Making a Bubble: Lift up the parachute all at once, step underneath the parachute and sit down/bring it to the ground swiftly. This creates a “dome” that you can sit on the edge of… it lasts for only a few seconds but is a ton of fun!
• Making Waves: Try doing this fast, slow, medium, big, little, etc.
• Keep Off: Kids try to bounce balls off of the parachute by waving it as counselors/staff run around and throw the balls back onto the parachute.
• Popcorn: Kids try to bounce balls on the parachute making sure they are all moving but none “pop” off!
• Running Underneath: Kids wave the parachute. Call out two or three names and those kids get to run beneath the parachute to the other side.

What parachute games have you played with kids?

~Miss Brenda

Ocean Commotion: Camp Theme

Dear Friends and Readers,

“Ocean” is a fairly common theme among preschoolers. It is the new rainforest/jungle theme. Which was the new zoo/menagerie  theme. I loved the ocean theme because it combined both the animal/environment theme of the jungle with an easy segue to water games. Perfect for summer camp when it is hot outside and there is little time to plan.

“Ocean Commotion” was one of our summer camp themes in the middle of July when I worked with preschoolers at the YMCA. Here is what we did:

• Ocean Placemats: Placemats are a great craft for preschoolers! Have kids make any flat, paper-size art project. Then laminate the papers with their names clearly labeled and use them to define the child’s eating space for the rest of the week!
• Duck Duck Goose Variations
  • Dolphin, Dolphin, Shark: Same game, different name.
  • Drip, Drip, Drop: Why use your hand when you can tag others with water? Some kids don’t like getting wet on their heads, and many like getting other kids wet, so we used a sponge rather than a bucket. Kids squeezed a little to “drip” and wrung out the whole sponge to “drop” the water.
• Song time: Have you ever sang The Beatles in circle time? I highly reccomend it. We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine…
• The Wave + Summer  = the best of a baseball game. We taught kids the wave and they loved it. I think the counselors loved it more.
• Pin the Tail on the Whale
• Make Fishing Poles
  • We used straws for poles, yarn for string and magnets taped to the yarn for hooks.
  • Kids later “went fishing” for paper fish with paperclips attached.
• Hair Gel/Sticker Ocean
  • Quart sized plastic bag filled 1/3 full with blue hair gel. Have kids pick out 4 or 5 fish stickers and put them into the bag. (Counselors/staff should handle everything up to this point.)
  • Once the bag is sealed, kids move the animals around in the gel. They loved it!
• Tag Games
  • Octopus Tag: One person is “it” and runs to tag others. Once tagged, kids sit down in the same spot like freeze tag, but reach out to tag others with their hands and feet.
  • Sharks and Minnows: One person starts out as a shark and the rest minnows. Once the shark tags a minnow, the minnow becomes another shark. Last person to be a minnow wins.
• Rainbow Fish
  • Story Time: Rainbow Fish. I had always asumed that everyone knew this book, but recently met a few people who haven’t. Some things that are “classics” among preschool teachers are foreign to those who don’t spend a lot of time with the under age 6 crowd. In case you haven’t read it, please head to a library and check it out. It will be well worth the trip.
  • Rainbow Fish Craft. I had cut out “scale” shapes. Each member decorated two with markers, glitter and glue. They got to keep one and gave one away.
• Ocean Animal Puppets
  • This was a super easy rainy-day craft. We found printables for ocean animal puppets and had kids glue them to paper bags.
  • Kids walked around with octopi, crabs and sea-horses for hands for the rest of the day.

What “ocean” activities have you done in the past?

~Miss Brenda

An Indiana Jones Adventure: Camp Theme

Dear Friends and Readers,

I have not watched the new Indiana Jones for two reasons. 1) Shia LaBeouf will be Louis Stevens forever and for always. He is not whatever characters he plays in movies; he is a 12 year old boy who plays pranks on his big sister. 2) Nothing will ever best the “Invisible Bridge” scene. Everything is down hill from there.

I don’t blame them for making more movies though. Who doesn’t love stories about searching for lost treasure? I can’t even blame my kids for loving the new Indiana Jones movie. They are too young to have watched Even Stevens and have probably never seen the older IJ movies either.

At the Y, one of our preschool camp themes was “An Indiana Jones Adventure.” Most of my preschoolers had never seen the Indiana Jones movies (or I hope they hadn’t seen them… PG-13 at age 4?), so it became more of a general exploration, treasure hunting theme. The kids loved it!

Here is what we did: 

• Newspaper Explorer hats: We made them and painted them as a craft and they took them home to play with at the end of the day. Kids were begging to wear them before they were even dry and a few brought them back and wore them throughout the week.
• Stepping Stones: Layed out paper and hula hoops and had kids use them as stepping stones from one side of the field to the other. Kids then moved the stepping stones to new places and went through the obstacle course again.
• Treasure Hunt: Kids were given paper bags and rolled them down to be half the height. These were our “treasure bags.” While they decorated them, counselors hid coins (cut out of construction paper) and jewels (cut up Mardi Gras necklaces). Kids then searched for the treasure!
• Treasure Map Activity: I made a “map” with pictures and words. Each kid got to read the map, discover a clue and lead the line to that destination. The final destination was a park across the street where we ate our lunches and played on the playground.
• Treasure Map Craft: Kids tore and crumpled grocery bags and then drew their own treasure maps. We rolled the maps and tied them with yarn before they took them home.
• Pyramids Building: We used blocks, rocks, cups and other objects to build pyramids.
• Paper Telescopes: Kids rolled up paper into telescopes, we taped them, and they ran around on the playground searching and spying for hours!
• Mummy Relay: Kids were divided into teams and raced to wrap up (and later unwrap) a counselor like a mummy.
• Fort Making: Kids took blankets/sheets and chose where to hang them on the playground. Staff stapled, tied and safety pinned the blankets/sheets around the railings and posts to create a fort. Kids played and explored in complete contentment (if not bliss) for the rest of the day.

What exploration/treasure hunting/Indiana Jones type activities have you tried? 

~Miss Brenda

“It’s A Jungle Out There” Camp Theme

Dear Friends and Readers, 

One of our theme weeks for camp when I worked at the Y was “It’s A Jungle Out There.” This theme was perfect for our preschoolers and could work well for  younger elementary students as well. 

Here is what we did: 

• Lines and Rules: 
  • The rope we used for line and transition times became our “Jungle Jeep.” The counselor leading the line would narrate what imaginary jungle sights and sounds were happening. We would ask each camper what they saw in their minds eye. It kept them calm, focused and engaged for most of the way and turned what would have been lost/dead time into another activity! Kids cutting across parking lots was simpler and less stressful when kids were already paying attention to staff. 
  • We had the kids imagine that the YMCA building itself was a jungle. There was a tiger inside and he was trying to sleep, so we had to be extra careful to stay quiet when walking through the halls so we didn’t wake him up! The kids in the YMCA drama camp later dressed up as Tigers and came to meet our kids. It was great! 
• Growing Plants: 
  • I had a plot in a community garden just across the street. We got special permission slips from parents and kids learned about growing their own plants! Each member was able to water plants, walk through and touch/smell the different vegetables and pick a green bean to eat with their lunch. Kids loved it and kept talking about it for the rest of the day (which, if you have ever worked with 3 and 4 year olds, is quite the feat).
  • We planted seeds along the edge of the forest and kids watered them each day. Nothing ever grew, but they loved it none the less.
• Collecting Games:
  • Nature Art: Kids collected pieces of nature and created sculptures. 
  • Make Your Own Jungle: Kids were each given a shoe box and created their own jungles with sticks, leaves and bugs that they caught.
  • Jungle Scavenger Hunt: Staff read one item off a list at a time and kids went and found that item. Items included: leaves, rocks, sticks, sand, something with an animal on it, etc.
• Other Crafts and Games:
  • Animal Masks: Kids created animal masks out of paper plates (we cut the holes for eyes and mouth in advance). 
  • We played “duck, duck, goose” only it was “monkey, monkey, tiger.”
  • Pin the Animal in the Jungle: Kids worked in groups to decorate a jungle poster and animals. They spun around and had to tape their animals to the jungle poster. 
  • Story Time: We read jungle books to the kids. They LOVED story time. 

What have you done for a Jungle theme? 

~Miss Brenda

Super Hero Day: Camp Theme

Dear Friends and Readers, 

Just this past December, during our annual Winter Break Camp, we had a Superhero and Villains day. The two week theme was “Alternate Reality” and each day had its own mini-theme. What better way to kick off than with an epic battle between good and evil? 

Here is what we did: 

Icebreakers.

Each camp day starts with a mini activity or series of mini activities. Our icebreakers for the day were “Pass the Superpower” and “Practice the Superpower.”

• In “Pass the Superpower,” kids had a super power (an object to be passed) that they were sending around a circle to protect it from the “villains” (staff). They could “whiz” (pass), “boink” (reverse), or “zap” (pass across) while staff around the outside of the circle reached in to grab the super power. We used a large building block because it was there, but anything would work. 

• In “Practice the Superpower,” kids spread out throughout the room and had to freeze. I would shout out a super power and kids would have to practice that power. I would then shout out another, and while still practicing the first, they would practice the second. When we got to three, I would shout out “regular person” and they would go back to having no powers. Example: “You can lay magical eggs!” “You can roar as loud as a lion” “You can jump higher than a Kangaroo!” *Kids pretend to lay eggs (the faces were great!), while roaring, while jumping. 

Super Hero Team Quest.

“Help! A Super Villain of the very worst kind has invaded the Boys and Girls Club! He has placed 8 objects of mass destruction throughout the club and we need your help to find them!”

• THE QUEST: Members were asked to help us save the club and collet these objects of mass destruction. No one, however, can complete a quest without superpowers. Kids would need to collect super powers along the way. These powers would allow them to enter different rooms and spaces in the building where they could retrieve the objects. Members were divided into groups, assigned a staff member, and let loose to reach their destiny!

• OBJECTS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: 8 sheets of paper with the words “Object of Mass Destruction” were hidden throughout the club for each team (4 teams = 32 sheets total). It was each teams mission to find all 8. 

• SPACES: In order to find them, teams had to earn the right to enter the rooms in which they were hidden by having the correct super powers. Each room was labeled as a different place. The requirements to enter were posted on the doors. Some of the places we used and their requirements for entering were: 
  • The Jungle (kids must be able to sing tigers to sleep)
  • The Ocean (kids must be able to breathe under water, stay warm and be invisible)
  • The Sky (members must be able to leap tall buildings and fly)
  • Outer Space (members must be able to fly and stay warm)
  • The Alligator Swamp (members must be able to breathe under water)
  • The Olympics (members must be able to leap tall buildings, have super strength and have super speed)
  • The Quarry (members must have super strength)
  • The Racetrack (members must have super speed)

• SUPER POWERS: Matching superpowers were placed throughout the club for kids to be able to collect, but each had a few strings attached. In order to keep the super power and not loose it, members had to practice it or represent it. Instructions for what was required were written on each sheet of paper that the kids needed to find.  Here are some of the superpowers we used:  
  • Singing Animals to Sleep.  Whenever the team is in the hallway (the jungle), the team must be singing the whole time so that the tigers don’t wake up. 
  • Super Speed. When they get this power, they must all run in place for 5 minutes as a team. Then, upon entering any room after that, 1 member must run in place for at least 1 minute. 
  • Super Strength. When they get this power, they must all do 10 pushups. For the rest of the game, one member must have their arms flexed. 
  • Ability to Stay Warm. One member must put on an extra coat/sweater for the rest of the game. 
  • Ability to Breathe Underwater. One member must plug their nose for the rest of the game. 
  • Ability to Fly. One member must flap their arms like wings for the rest of the game.
  • Ability to Leap Tall Buildings. One member must hop/jump for the rest of the game.
  • Invisibility:  One member must go to the front desk to get an “invisibility” cloak. At least one member of the team must wear the cloak for the rest of the game. 

• A Few Notes/Tips: 
  • We let kids switch powers to take turns/take breaks. 
  • If you replicate, be sure that it make sense logically. Kids can’t get the power to fly unless they are able to get into the room where that power is. If the power to fly is housed in the room that requires the power of strength, but you can’t get to the power of strength without going into a room that requires the power to fly, then the game becomes impossible. Map it out logically before you set up the game.  
  • Teams finish at different times. Make sure that you have a space where kids can go when they are done, or that staff are prepared to entertain them. It can easily be up to a half hour difference between finishing times. 
  • We have tried games like this with staff being stationary and with staff wandering with teams. Each group having a staff with them works the best, by far. 

Super Hero Hangman. 

• This was a “we have extra time and need an extra game” activity. I gave staff a list of “superhero” themed words and phrases, and they added their own playing with kids. 
• Kids at our club LOVE hangman. They could play it for hours. Other simple games can be adapted to fit themes as well (pictionary, charades, 20 questions, etc). 

Make Your Own Super Hero

• Members were divided into their same teams. 
• Each team had to dress up and create a “back story” for at least one superhero or villain. Most teams ended up dressing up every team member as a different character. We gave them about an hour. They had a blast!

What Superhero games and activities have you used?

~Miss Brenda