Camp Beginnings

Almost 3 years ago, I started my home daycare business. It was a very rewarding experience, as I was able to be at home for my own 2 girls and was able to continue using my skills in program planning for children. My daycare kids' last day was June 26, and it was bittersweet. I got tears in my eyes when the little ones gave me a painting of a hand-print tree with the caption, "Thank you for helping us to grow".

While I was done with diapers and runny noses, I wasn't ready to be completely done with the business.  In the winter, I had a light-bulb moment to operate a summer camp, after my older daughter mentioned that some of her friends were going to camp, and that she wanted to go too. I was hesitant to look for work out of the home with a July 2 start date, as I still wanted to be home with my girls for the summer. I started asking friends and acquaintances for input on the idea, and everyone seemed to like it. By using word of mouth and social media, I found 5 extra girls for the summer. My girls were as excited as I was. I decided to do a 4-week camp, and parents could choose any number of weeks. I set the cost at $100/week per child, which was based on a) a slightly cheaper cost than city-run camps, and b) I could buy programming supplies for a good variety of activities (so that we're not just colouring every day).

Week 1 was fantastic. In addition to my own girls Z (age 5) and A (age 3), I had HR (age 5) and L (age 4). My theme was "Science/Kitchen Creations". While I was creating the schedule back in May, I knew that I would not want to do a "baking" themed week due to the heat, so all of our recipes were no-bake or stove-top if needed.

DAY 1

We hit the ground running on Monday. The 3 of us were outside setting up by the time the other 2 girls showed up. Activity 1 was Milk Painting. We poured some milk onto plates and added a few drops of 3 colours of food colouring. Then we dipped cotton swabs into dish soap and mixed it into the milk. The girls' first instinct was to mix quickly, but I suggested to see what would happen if they just dipped it in a teeny tiny bit and whoa! what a neat reaction. Now, my husband is the chemist, not I, and I cannot explain these scientific reactions, even in kid-friendly terms. I just help them to explore "what happens if...?" scenarios in their experimenting and then encourage them to use their own language to tell me what they are seeing. I think the take-home from that experiment was "if I knock down my plate, I will end up with milk and food colouring all over my clothes", and "if I mix red, blue, and yellow, I will get brown".  Needless to say, we got some pretty cool-looking prints of the swirled colours before they turned to mud!

Activity 2 was named "Grassheads". We filled up nylons with grass seed and soil and placed them in terra cotta pots, then decorated the pots with bits of string and ribbon, and cutouts of our faces. Lesson learned: We should have used plastic pots. Once we watered the grassheads, all of the trimmings fell off, and it was very difficult to re-apply the pictures; the glue gun glue would not stick very well to the damp pots. I gave them a quick blow-dry before re-applying.

These are the grassheads today; 6 days since germination.

We spent the rest of the morning outside and then all of the girls chose to have a rest time after lunch. This only lasted about 15 minutes, but I was very impressed at how self-regulating they were.

The girls have been squirreling toilet paper rolls for months, and I thought that that black box day would be the perfect day to put them to use. We used about 50 rolls and a lot of dollar store masking tape to create a giant marble run from the landing between floor 1 and 2 all the way down the handrail to the basement. Once we had the marble run in working order (after many many test runs), we completed the project with the plastic marble run at the bottom for the marbles to run into. It was so well done that it stayed for most of the week. I think that someone (perhaps A, my 3 yr old) tried to use minions instead of marbles. We took it down Thursday evening.

DAY 2

On Tuesday, we made "Wizard's Brew", which is your basic "volcano" recipe. This never ceases to amaze me, especially since we added pretty glitter for dramatic effect. Once again, we used the food colouring, because plain white science experiments are just not as exciting. The girls really liked adding more vinegar and colour to their brew. The actual experiment only lasted a couple of minutes, but they spent the next half-hour scooping and mixing all of the different concoctions.

We then made some "moon sand", which is 8 cups of flour and 1 cup of oil. I had some lovely-scented body oil that I was never going to use, so once they were covered from head to toe in white flour, they also smelled pretty. If you've never heard or seen moon sand, it is a substance that is crumbly like sand, but sticks together quite well when compacted. It is almost like a very flaky pie crust that you think will never roll out properly, but then does (like magic!)

Homemade Ice Cream was our next challenge. The recipe that I found for dairy-free ice cream is on this site: http://glutenfreeonashoestring.com/gluten-free-dairy-free-easy-ice-cream/

The author of this blog admittedly needed to try this recipe 6 times before she succeeded.  I would try it many times more as well (if my own kids were dairy-free), but I chose this recipe for one of my campers. Unfortunately, you don't know that it doesn't work until you try to freeze it. We found out by the end of the day that it didn't work, and I remedied the situation by defrosting the whole thing and scooping the contents into popsicle moulds. Win!

DAY 3

If you have a sweet tooth and want a triceps workout, try making taffy. My goodness, it needs to be pulled a lot to get the right consistency! The payout is a sweet, melt-in-your mouth treat. (Oh, did I mention that most of the kitchen creations this week are in no way healthy whatsoever?) I did not get any pictures of this, as we all had our hands coated in butter and sticky goo most of the morning. I think we pulled for an hour at least. We used green food colouring and peppermint flavouring. I found the recipe at http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Grandmas-Taffy/

The site says "ready in 20 minutes" but that is not true. The taffy in the pot took at least 30 minutes to get up to the right temperature, and then it had to cool, and then we pulled it, and then we had to cut and wrap it. By the end, I was making taffy pieces approximately 3-4 inches long and 1" diameter, as there was so much of it! The girls helped cut it at first, into pieces the size of my thumbnail. At that point, the taffy was still quite sticky and I could easily merge them into larger pieces.

DAY 4

Murphy's Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will. The plan for Thursday was to make a partial sundial with shadows. I was going to have each girl stand in a marked spot and then mark the top of their head at each hour all day. As you can guess, it was cloudy all day. However, there was enough brightness to do our other science activity: photo developing. I had been given a package of special paper that turned white in the sunlight and back to blue once it was "developed" (placed in water and then dried). The girls found objects around the house and the yard to place on top of the paper while exposed to sunlight, including letter shapes, rocks, twigs, leaves, and play dough cutters.

Some examples post-development: