How to start a summer camp program

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Building a calendar of events that you develop alongside your staff is a great step toward an organized, enriching camp experience. One of the most important parts of camp management is thorough planning. Going in with a plan can take the stress off you and your staff and keep the days moving so that campers are always engaged and having fun.

Overall, the opportunities for fun are endless. Do you want your camp to emphasize art? Here are a few general games and crafting ideas to get you thinking:. There are many reasons to go into the summer with some camp game or crafting ideas. And while these are just a few ideas, many counselors enjoy coming up with their own games — which can go on to become classic, signature games at their camps.

A camp places several young people in an entirely new place surrounded by strangers. Taking children out of their comfort zones is one of the great benefits of a summer camp. There are quite a few tried-and-true camp icebreakers. Summer camp offers a new sense of freedom and exploration for children. While this is one of the best parts of camp, it can lead to some misbehavior.

Your policy should respect the freedom of camp, treat children fairly, and promote better behavior for all campers. When it comes to sending their child off to camp, parents have concerns. This can be an introductory letter at the beginning of camp or regular follow-up letters. Though the term letter might make you think of paper, these can also be emailed to parents. But what should you include in this letter? A little bit about yourself and your staff.

What are you qualifications? Your experience? Why did you want to open a camp in the first place? You should also introduce your staff. Have your counselors write up a quick blurb about themselves so that parents can learn about counselors in their own words. What activities do you have planned? Give an overview of what a day at camp will be like for their children. What games do you have planned? Will children be working in teams or groups?

What meals and snacks do you have planned? What about day trips? Details regarding everyday life at camp will certainly be of interest to parents and will put them at ease as they send their children off. Give your contact information. Parents need a way to get in touch with you and your staff. Explain your goals. What do you want campers to take away from your camp? You should have clear ideas in mind regarding the enrichment opportunities that come with your camp.

Outline them at a high level in this letter and explain why the activities and structure you have planned will help you achieve these goals. Outline some history. When was this camp started? Are there special traditions at this camp? But including a broad overview adds some color to your letter and gives entertaining context.

Include past testimonials. If applicable, add some quotes from past campers. Or even add feedback from parents of previous campers.

Summer camp letters are a great way to open up a dialogue with the parents of your campers. Put care into your letter — and proofread before sending it out. Beyond that, you want to make sure all of your campers have access to delicious, nutritious food that fits their needs. Going in with a clear plan and lots of recipes is the best route toward a fun — and delicious — time at camp. Camp can get messy. This means you have to maintain certain hygiene and sanitation standards so that campers stay healthy and comfortable.

Here are some musts:. Plentiful bathrooms. When nature calls, your staff and campers need options. Making sure these bathrooms are clean, functional, and stocked with soap, paper towels, and more is also very important. Plumbing inspection. To make sure your bathrooms are functional, hire a plumber to take a look at your plumbing system before camp starts. If there are any problems at your facility, you can identify and fix them before campers arrive.

For resident camps, showers. To make sure your campers stay clean at your resident camp, make sure you have a prescribed time for campers to take showers. Have your custodial staff regularly keep these showers clean and well stocked with soap and shampoo. Have a chore chart or hire a janitor. Keeping your camp clean is a lot for one staff member to do.

Some efficient camp staffs have a detailed chore chart, and everyone pitches in to clean. Some camps even have campers pitch in on cleaning to teach responsibility and give them agency over their space.

Practice proper handwashing. This goes for everyone at camp — the staff, the campers, and you. Make sure anyone involved in food preparation is washing regularly, and remind all of your campers to wash their hands before meals.

This limits the spread of germs. It all comes back to being proactive and staying organized. What exactly do you expect of your staff members? You need to make your expectations abundantly clear so that you and your employees are on the same page.

You can expand these job descriptions during the application and interview process. You can accept applications, schedule interviews, and collect references in JotForm.

This will make it easy for you to review applications and other materials all in one place. You need to establish employee policies so that your staff knows the behavior that is expected of them. Obvious guidelines, like no drinking or drugs, should be a no-brainer and immediately disqualifying if broken.

Communicate these policies and put the infrastructure in place so that your employees are aware of the policies and have agreed to follow them. Another major staffing factor involves salaries. How much will you pay your staff members?

Will some of your younger staffers be volunteers? Will staffers who return in subsequent years make more than first-time staff members? These are all questions to consider in relation to your budget and profit goals. Ensure everyone is being paid fairly while still keeping in mind your business plan. You want the best possible staff for your camp — people who are trained to work with kids and who are respectful, hard-working, and passionate about providing a great time for all campers.

Every year, thousands of young people come to the United States from other countries to work at camps. It can be an enriching experience for campers and staff alike as they get to experience new cultures. Work options. This way you can make sure everyone is getting paid adequately and is legally protected for the duration of their employment. Most people who have traveled outside of the U. As with overall camp management, staying organized and being proactive is the best to way to make sure everyone is taken care of and ready for a summer of hard work and fun.

In the same way that your campers will bond over the course of the summer, so too will your staff. Here are some ways to help your staff members build relationships:. Bonding session. At the beginning of the summer, take your staff out for a big meal or a fun activity.

Whatever stimulates conversation among staff members is best. This will be a great icebreaker and help your staff form close relationships before the summer even begins.

This can be a regular event. This means handling disagreements and conflicts among your staff and working as an intermediary who keeps everyone happy so that they can do their best work. Treat everyone the same and balance workloads. Favoritism and unbalanced workloads are the easiest ways to cause conflict among your staff.

Keep up with how much each staff member is doing. Get regular feedback from your staff so that you can be aware of problems that are arising and get an idea of how everyone is performing in their assigned tasks. Keep relationships in mind when hiring. To begin with, you are going to need at least a camp nurse on hand to treat the inevitable bumps, bruises, lacerations, and other issues that can arise when you have a lot of active people in one place. A team of nurses on hand is usually more than enough to staff most summer camps, though you might want to bring a doctor aboard if that fits your budget and make sense for your specific operation.

This is something you will want to hammer home, guaranteeing that every adult at your camp has the basic training necessary to provide emergency care around-the-clock.

These medical forms will outline a lot of core information that your medical team will need to provide proper treatment. This includes details like pre-existing conditions, medications and dosages, and allergies and sensitivities, and a whole host of other information that will help them have a safer summer under your care. You must zero in on things like allergies — particularly food allergies — as you will be responsible for providing meals all summer long. You and your team will need to consider hygiene and sanitation details, fully understanding that a camp filled with children will get messy now and again.

This will also avoid major plumbing emergencies, shower systems that are ready to rock and roll, bathroom and shower facilities for disabled individuals, and the list goes on and on. If you can show the parents, you care about their children, having them sign up will be much easier.

Budget Tip: When it comes to camper health, there is no budgeting. Even if you need to pay more upfront, it can end up saving a lot not only in monetary terms, but also in terms of reputation.

Right out of the gate, before you even start a summer camp, you are going to need to carry medical and liability insurances to guarantee that any accident is completely covered from top to bottom. Summer camp insurance is crucial for risk management. There is a lot of summer camp specific insurance policies that you will take advantage of. Budget Tip: Always get more than insurance quote. A difference of a hundred or couple hundred dollars can quickly add up.

However, ensure you have the right policy depending on the risks of your camps. A horseback riding camp will probably need more coverage than a standard camp. Liability is not something you won't to worry about since it can ruin quickly lead to bankruptcy. Many of these organizations will be more than happy to send these applications your way. There are also many online portals and platforms that you can post counselor and staffing listings on.

However, you want to describe the positions in as much detail as possible while always looking for experienced veterans of the industry to bring aboard.

Any training that may apply to the job you are hiring them for and other details will help you make your hiring decisions a little more comfortable. A lot of summer camps decide to go down the s independent contractor route for a lot of their positions, which may or may not make sense for your specific situation. Speak to an accountant before you make any decisions in this department. This is helped by us asking that all projects get cleaned up when they're done, but it's really clean-up time that makes this work.

Our control here was making clean-up time shorter or longer, depending on how productive chaotic the day had been. On an average day clean-up time was 20 minutes long. We've at times used job charts to make the quell the "I don't know what to do! With great freedom comes great responsibility! They wake up, excited, full of ideas, eager to come, and spent the day doing what they want to. Even so, it's really useful to start the camp week by talking about what makes the camp environment different from other places they might be used to.

There's something really charming about seeing the moment of recognition that kids had during the first couple of years of Camp K when, midway through the week, they'd say something like "so we can build whatever we want? Some kids need some help getting used to camp. The biggest categories I've seen are kids that are really shy, and kids that are socially awkward in some way. For kids that are really shy, we usually have a number of counselors not doing activities at any given time, and one of their tasks is to look out for anyone who looks a little bit lonely in a corner, and help find find an activity for them and fold them into the group.

We often have an opening activity for kids arriving Monday morning to go, so that if kids want to, they can meet a few kids and counselors in a small group and gradually orient themselves. There are some particularly good activities to start the week out with. In the first few days of camp you want to introduce kids to each other, to the adults, and to all of the tools that they can freely use. Some activities are really good for promoting social interaction.

I love to start monday morning off with candle-making because it involves a small group of kids usually mixed-gender! They get to know each other and they get to know you. As an added bonus, I found that girls who I met while leading candle-making would frequently follow me to the electronics-room when I led an activity there. Other activities are great because they introduce kids to tools that they can work with independently for the rest of the week.

A counselor-led take-apart activity, and introduction to circuits with LEDs, motors, and breadboards, and an introduction to Scratch are all really powerful. Ideally by wednesday all of the kids are pretty much doing their own stuff and you're just wandering from place to place offering advice, inspiration, and safety. For kids that are socially awkward for example, if they have trouble sharing, or if they yell at other children when not included , we've found the best thing is to assign a few counselors to the child and have them work closely with the child.

The counselors can check in with the child, and the child can trust that they can go find these certain adults if they're having trouble and talk to them about what's going on. Often the problem is a matter of the child not knowing how to communicate something important to them how to ask for an object or for inclusion in a game , and we've found that these problems can fester if left to their own devices a child who's not good at sharing will quickly be faced with the bigger problem of not having any friends and not being able to share!

While some may argue that these natural consequences are best, in a short-term environment like camp, I feel that providing what help we can with children's communication is the best way to go though it sure can be tough at times! Make do with what you have, and remember that all of the counselors are around to help each other! I remember one day at cleanup time when a kid was totally freaking out about the day ending, and not being done with his project, and having to clean.

I was working on something else at the time, but I saw another counselor really struggling with this -- the kid was getting angrier and angrier at him and there didn't seem to be anything that was going to break this loop. I happened to have a dead battery in my pocket and happened to need batteries for wahtever I was doing.

I went up to the kid and said "Hey, listen, sorry to interrupt -- I need two of these batteries and I think this one's dead -- can you test this battery and find me a few more that aren't dead?

The multi-meter should be on the workbench. The problem didn't entirely go away, but it was defused, and the child and I had a conversation while he helped me out. Sometimes everything works great with the kids, but there are problems between adults. Most of these problems end up coming from some people feeling overworked and other people feeling underrespected. Try to avoid both of these things. After doing Camp Kaleidoscope with 60 kids per week one summer, we started Parts and Crafts and initially had between 2 and 8 kids weekly.

Working with 8 kids was effortless! When you scale up to 60 kids, I highly recommend that you do everything that you can to make it resemble 10 groups of 6 more than 1 group of The most important thing, I think, is for adults to work together closely and talk about their days together, that way, whatever goes right, and whatever goes wrong, everyone is learning, and things will definitely improve!

We ran a workshop on making electromagnets and motors at the MIT Museum last January, and were swamped with way more kids than we were expecting or had the staff for.

On the spot, I came up with the following three rules, inspired by the need to reduce the pressure on our staff and encouraging kids to teach themselves. If you don't know what to do you should First, look around and see if you can figure out what to do. If you can't, look around, and either ask a friend or ask another person who looks like they know what they're doing.

And if you can't find anyone who looks like they can help, ask an expert in this case, ask an adult. This was shockingly helpful. It redirected the various cries of "I'm confused: help!

While it's often not what they're used to the norm in most schools being stay quiet and wait for the teach to give instructions , kids take to this decentralized style of doing activities really quickly. We also found it incredibly useful to put as much information about how to do things in the environment as possible.

The electronics room became a significantly more awesome places on the day that I got fed up with teaching kids how to wire LEDs to switches, and made large posters diagramming these circuits in a kid-friendly way. In an ideal world I would have lots of documentation of different good projects lying around in the appropriate places where kids could stumble on them and get excited.

A computer devoted to browsing Instructables. I'm going to end my instructable here. There's lots and lots more to say, and if anyone's got any questions, I'm happy to write more! There are more pieces about camp at nagle. Have fun, and good luck! Question 2 years ago on Step 9. Thanks for the info. It was very useful. I am looking to start a summer camp, but wanted to know what type of business structure did you originally use when you first started out. Did you do the LLC route then go for the non profit?

Also, what made you decide to go the non profit route when you did? Question 3 years ago on Step 1. Hi, I was just browsing around in google search and found this website. I'm planning a youth camp for 2 years later. They are attending to deaf school. I am a teacher and have created several summer camps for my kids and their friends, as well as for schools. I had an idea that it might be fun to have a camp based on the book or something similar The Daring Book for Girls or things all girls should know.

Anyone out there already invent this wheel? Our camp centers as a purpose driven entertainment and leadership camp event, which will also be having certain celebrities from various industries such as: music, art, fashion, Movies and the rest, visit and enlighten them about life realities in practical terms. We believe edutainment is a truthful way of encouraging our teenagers for the reality of the future.

It's for ages The camp also has other features such as the sports, dinner, awards, Entrepreneurship build-up, Career talks, orphanage visit and more. Reply 6 years ago. You can make a website with tools on the web, like Weebly or perhaps Wordpress.

I would put something up to start. You can refine it and improve its look as you go. The real way we got momentum was by running free workshops on weekends -- about an afternoon long. This was a form of getting the word out that showed children and family what it would be like to come to our program. Maybe something like this would work for you.

So me and my friends want to make a summer camp but we are not sure if we need licensing since we are only 15 years old. Can someone reply if you have and answer? It would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Reply 6 years ago on Introduction. If you're doing something beyond just you and your friends and kids you already know, you'd need a license. If it's informal and it's just you and younger kids you know getting together for a few weeks then I think you can just work out that with the relevant families.

Why don't you check it out and check back in here as it develops? Hello Nagle I'm going to start a summer program. How do I come up with a name that evolves around children k So cool to find this instructable written by you! My kids were at Camp K. Any advice on promoting a new camp?

I have a meetup that teaches women technology front-end development and I am considering creating a similar camp for girls summer Best, Sara. I'm happy to brainstorm with you or think more about what this would look like. My email is mpnagle atsign gmail dot com. One thought is if you would want to do something on your own or partner with the Cambridge non-profit Science Club for Girls.

Maybe check out their web site -- I could make an introduction if helpful. Any thoughts about opening a camp kids stay at sleep? Specifically in regards to cost. Also what are the laws, for any camp, about running it on your own property? I'm from MA. Great article. A friend and i have the idea of starting our own inner city sports camp in Brooklyn nyc.