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Summer Camps: Learning Opportunities When School's Out

Summer camps offer a wide variety of learning opportunities for children in a healthy, natural environment with their peers.

Throughout the school year, it can be challenging to get your kid outdoors. Urban sprawl and outdoor areas that are increasingly inaccessible and deemed unsafe means there are fewer options for play and exploration. Indoor activities like surfing the internet or playing video games leave some children spending their summers indoors and, in effect, sedentary. This exacerbates the increases in childhood inactivity, eating disorders, and related health conditions.

Enrolling in a summer camp is a way to get your kid in a safe, active outdoor setting where there's plenty of room learn life-lessons.

Research on Summer Camps

Summer camps foster the value of learning in a natural setting, and nurture a love for learning.

"You're going to become a good productive citizen if you go to camp and have the benefit of mentorship. You learn a lot about yourself, and develop self-knowledge," says Dr. Stephen Fine, the director of the Hollows Camp. He has a PhD from Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and wrote his dissertation about the experience of residential summer camp.

"Kids have the opportunity to learn beyond the classroom, so I started investigating all kinds of summer programs," says Dr. Fine. His thesis looks at summer camps and the social, personal and physical developments that occur when students become actively involved in the offerings of a camp program.

"It's being engaged in what you're learning, so that you can see some relevance between the theoretical and the practical," he says.

Nature Deficit Disorder

"Camps provide one of the few opportunities for children to spend time in nature, as outdoor education programs were whittled away over time," says Dr. Fine. Like many North Americans, he spends plenty of time indoors and at a computer. He recognizes the impact nature deficit disorder is having on children in the digital age.

In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv writes about nature deficit disorder, and says that children of the digital age are increasingly being alienated from the natural world to the detriment of their physical, mental and spiritual health.

Overnight Camps

For kids who are driven from activity to activity, overnight summer camp can be a time for both rejuvenation and activity.

“I like to say that camp takes you to a 'walking pace'," Dr. Fine says. "When you're at camp you have to walk everywhere. It gives you time to reflect on what happened the day before, that morning or an hour before."

Kids are also busy taking part in many new experiences during the course of the day so that time feels "compressed", says Dr. Fine. "Many new experiences have happened between breakfast and dinner. For children, it seems like a whirl of happenings have taken place in a short span of time."

Day Camps

Day camps work well for kids who want to stay close to home.

"Day camps offer all of the same kinds of new opportunities presented at overnight camps," says Dr. Fine. "Kids can fraternize and socialize in a healthy way, but they'll get to go home at night and stay in their own room".

Themed summer camps are a way to have a camp experience with a twist. Toronto Culture runs day camps located in historic sites all across the city. The Scarborough Historical Museum operates the Pioneer Adventure Day Camp. Set in Thomson Memorial Park, the camp takes advantage of the 1850s Victorian houses in the park.

Madeleine Callaghan, Curator of the Scarborough Historical Museum says, “It’s an amazing setting. It’s like being in the country for a day.”

The Pioneer Adventure Program combines traditional physical activity, and the experience of learning about the life of a 19th century Canadian settler. “At the end of every week, campers play Jeopardy, and show how much they’ve learned about local history – without even knowing it,” says Callaghan.

For more information on camps in Canada check out Camps.ca.

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