Hello camp families! It’s hard to believe it, but another year of camp has come to an end. We had a lot of fun this summer learning about all sorts of things from many different areas of study , from astronomy, to physics, to ecology etc. We have also visited some pretty cool places around town, such as the Arboretum and the Kelsey Museum. But of course we have also enjoyed spending the majority of our time in our new home at the museum! We thought a nice way to end camp was to put together our favorite camp activities from past sessions and combine them with some new ones to come up with a smorgasbord that we like to call, “Best of Camp Explorations.”
Down below you will find a brief summary of what we did each day as well as some pictures to go along.
Monday/ Tuesday
Astronomy
The campers saw the planetarium show, “The Sky Tonight.” This show talks about what we see in the night sky, like the stars, planets and constellations. Unfortunately pictures cannot be taken inside the dome, but I’m sure the campers had a blast learning about space. Be sure to ask your campers what they saw!
Campers went on a scavenger hunt to learn all sorts of interesting facts about our solar system. There were 18 facts cards hidden throughout the second floor of the museum. It was up to them to find them all and use the information to answer some questions.
A craft we did in preparation for Thursday was decorating bottle rockets. Each group received three 2 liter bottles and then within each group 3 teams were formed to decorate each rocket. The rockets ended up looking really cool!
Another craft that some groups got to do was making a solar system belt and sun hat. This was a cute way to not only review the planets in our solar system but wear them as well.
Paleontology
Something we always enjoy doing with the campers is giving them a tour of the evolution gallery. Even if they have already seen it before, they never seem to grow tired of it. What’s even better is when we do the triceratops hat craft the same day as the tour, so we end up having a bunch of triceratopses roaming the gallery.
Whenever we do anything with paleontology we have to do the triceratops hat craft. It’s fun, relatively simple to make and cute.
The campers also made some prehistoric dioramas. They could choose between an ice age animal or a dinosaur and once they decided which one they wanted, they then had to make an appropriate habitat for it.
Campers pretended to be paleontologists going on a three day dig to identify a mystery animal. Each day they would find a certain amount of bones and then they would make guesses as to what animal it could be. It was hard at first but once they had found all the bones, it was pretty easy to tell that the animal was a dinosaur. Identifying the dinosaur was a little bit trickier though. Some groups remembered seeing the Edmontosaurus in the evolution gallery tour and put two and two together and correctly identified it.
Wednesday
On Wednesday campers learned about the owl and its nocturnal antics. They then made an owl mask.
We then learned about some desert animals and how some of them have adapted to the desert habitat through the way they move, like the kangaroo. We then had a relay race where each camper was assigned a desert animal to be and move like they move.
The ecology activity the campers did came in two parts. The first part of the activity had campers learning about watersheds and the parts in one. The second part taught the campers about how humans can affect a watershed in a negative way if we are not careful. The two ‘types’ of pollution we talked about were point source and non point source pollution.
Thursday
On Thursday we launched our rockets! We walked over to Palmer field and had a blast, take a look for yourself!
Besides the rockets, Thursday was robot day! Campers got to learn and play with several different type of robots ranging in complexity. They played with HexBugs, Code & Go Mice Robots, Ozobots and then the older campers played with Lego Mindstorm robots.
The campers also played with snap circuits. They learned that completing a circuit allows electric current to flow which can then lead to cool things happening.
Friday
On Friday we went to the Arb! There we played some parachute games. Afterwards we explored a bit before we headed back to the museum for an ice cold refreshing Popsicle!
We hope you all had as much fun as we did! Have a great rest of your summer, and we hope to see you all next year! 🙂