Grandma Day Camp (year 7!)

Arguably the best week of summer: Grandma Day Camp! For about a week in the summer, my mom and her sister put on Grandma Day Camp, where they have fun crafts and activities for all their grandkids. The kids love it, and so do the parents (I usually dive into major project mode while the kids are there!). I’m not too involved in the planning, but I thought I’d give ya a quick run down on things to give you an idea of how it goes. I know I’m slow in posting this info, but hopefully it’ll help if you’re already starting to think of fun for next year. Also, think outside of the box – if you want this for your own kiddos, you could always jump right in and host a cousin camp or neighborhood camp or whatever you can think of!

The key is planning – activities and supplies and meals, all planned and prepped ahead of time. Once you figure out what works, you can just use that year after year and it’ll get easier 😉 They run theirs from 9 til 3 each day, for 3 or 4 days. Then there’s a family activity in the evening on the last day (one year it was a campout, one year it was attending a theater-in-the-park, etc).

DAILY DUTIES: the kids are given assignments and they rotate for each day. So there are a few assigned to lead the Flag Ceremony, a few assigned lunch prep, a few assigned clean up, etc.

DAILY SCHEDULE: they run a general daily schedule – start with a flag ceremony, then circle time and singing camp songs. Then it’s crafts/activities, then lunch, then more crafts/activities. Then they end with more singing of camp songs. There’s a camp song book they each have and each kiddo gets to pick out a song to sing.

CAMP SHIRTS: each year they make camp shirts – I usually cut the vinyl decal for the front and they decorate it in some way.

this year they all put their footprints on the back:

LUNCH and SNACKS: since the kids are in charge of cooking, the food is all simple prep. Some years they make it extra fun and cook on buddy burners or over the fire.

ACTIVITIES: they are great about planning a big activity or field trip each year – some year’s they’ve toured farms, or museums, etc. This year they held a bike rodeo:

CRAFTS: of course there’s crafting, lots of crafting. In the past they’ve made paper mache pigs, ripcord bracelets, whittled soap, etc. This year they decorated camp stool buckets, made dream catchers, string art, painted rock cactus, and other things I’m sure I’m forgetting.

EXPANDED FUN: on the last day, they invited more cousins to join the fun (not just their grandkids). It was an outdoor day filled with awesome outdoor Mountain Man activities.

To prep for Mountain Man day, they each whittled a walking stick:

My uncle ran most of the activities on Mountain Man day – and he brought his pet snake along…

There was hatchet and knife throwing…

and bb gun shooting

and a team rely of stations at the end:

This is the 7th year of Grandma Day Camp – – I dug up this picture from year 1, when we had first moved back to live by family and they each made their own giant cookies . It was great! If you’d like a recap from last year’s Grandma Day Camp, I blogged that last year.