Giant Battleship At Camp

Supplies...

Battle Ship Pics.002.jpg

    Enough Sponges for half the number of people (We cut Grout Sponges in to 8ths. Joe Richards suggests cutting up old camp mattress, awesome!)

    A bucket of water for each ship

    A ballon full of shampoo and tempera paint

    5 gallon bucket of flour

    The giant game board

Creating the Giant Game Board...

Basically we need to create a playing area where the opposite sides can’t see each other with clear boundaries, marked with cones or paint. The entire playing area is about half a basketball court with a barrier in the middle. We used tarps over 2 soccer goals. You could use tarps over anything like a volleyball net.

Battleship Diagram.jpg

Setting the stage…

Giant Battleship is just like it sounds, awesome! The objective is to sink all of the other teams ships. Each ship is made by groups of 8-10 campers, we used cabin groups. These ships are each given a heaping bowl of flour (Pro Tip: Have extra flour on hand, we drastically under estimated the amount we would need the first time we played), a bucket of water with enough sponges for each person to have one, and a paint ballon. With the flour, each ship group creates the physical representation of the ship on ground. Campers can decide how large or small to make it and what the shape will be. Once each ship is drawn the campers stand inside. Each ship in succession does a silly cheer. The cheer allows the opposing team to hear and guess where the ships are located.

Playing! 

The game begins with one team standing in their ships and throwing all their sponges over the barrier trying to hit the other teams ships. If a sponge lands inside your ship, your ship has been hit. If your ship is hit twice it sinks. When a ship sinks all members of that ship yell abandon ship and find other ships to join. They now stand inside another ship and will thrown from there. While the sponges are flying the people in each ship can try to block, catch, or bat away the sponges to keep them from landing inside the ship. Once all the sponges have been thrown by Team A, Team B gathers the sponges. After gathering all the sponges Team B’s turn to throw starts on the mark. At any point while a team is throwing sponges the paint balloons may be thrown. If a paint ballon lands in a ship that ship is sunk instantly. 

The game ends when all of one teams ships have been sunk. 

Leave us a comment if you play similar games or have ideas to make this one better!

3 Ways to Let Staff Train Themselves

I struggle with lectures. I especially struggle when I have no control over who I am listening to or what I get to do. This is the difference for me between learning in high school and a conference or youtube. I hated “learning” in high school and was not motivated or gritty about my school work. I was always in trouble for not taking notes or “collaborating" on homework. This became more true in college, where I, afraid of not getting a job or looking stupid, majored in industrial engineering knowing it didn’t make me happy. I skipped class, "collaborated” more, and skated by, finally getting a degree I hope never to use. 

Here is where the story takes a turn. After years of never wanting to learn anything in a comfortable college environment, Laura and I travelled across the country, living in the back of a Honda Civic, trying to learn as much as we could. We were finally free to do whatever we wanted and we chose to seek out learning and great camps, because we loved camp and had the freedom to choose. I love going to conferences. Sitting and listening to long presentations where I diligently take notes and follow up with presenters. What’s different?

"Research has shown unequivocally that children learn best when they are interested in the material or activity they are learning.” (New York Times Article By Susan Engel Phd)

With this idea of interest based learning in mind we are beginning to plan staff training. We will use tons of tricks to help grab the interest of staff, like photos, jokes, stories, great presentations, and group work, but we are also working to give staff control over what they want to learn. 

3 Ideas We Love…

Summer Camp Conference for Summer Camp Counselors

At Camp Stella Maris and many other camps we have seen the idea to simply spend a morning with a bunch of different session running at the same time, similar to a conference. Counselors then aren't being told what to learn but are free to discover. At 9 AM we have Crazy New Games is Jim, Homesickness 2.0 with Gary, and Why Camp? with Sarah. At 10 AM… This set up lets counselors choose what they are interested in and gives some knowledgeable staff members a chance to lead. 

Solve For X

Solve for X is a forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork. http://www.wesolveforx.com G+: http://goo.gl/T3qQo Solve for X is a place where people can go to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems. Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people.

Google runs a small conference focused on moonshot thinking with some of the best minds in the world and the format is fascinating. They do a series of 2 or 3 twenty minute lectures then have a half hour to an hour to discuss. These discussions of each topic happen at small tables that the participants choose. At camp for example it could look like this. We play 3 TED talks in a row, Leadership Starts With Why, The Power of Vulnerability, and The Power of Introverts. A leadership staff member is assigned to each. The individual staff members then choose which video to discuss and find that leadership staff member. In these small chosen groups they discuss, following the "What? So What? Now What?" debriefing model, things like...

What does this mean? How does this apply to camp? With parents? Campers? Staff? Ourselves? What tangible things can we do this summer? How does this idea interact with the other videos of sessions?

Open Space

Open space is the idea that the participants ask for what they need to learn and other participants run workshops to help facilitate. At Friends Camp their whole staff training is done this way. Nat Shed, the director, sits in on the forming of the training plan and interjects when he thinks there are missing pieces of ACA requirements, but for the most part returning staff know the boring stuff needs to be covered and often come with cool new ideas to cover dry material.  

-Jack

Searching For Great Teachings

Laura and I embarked on our journey searching or the perfect camp almost 2 years ago. We knew we had a lot to learn but had no idea how little we knew. Each camp brought us fresh perspectives and forced us to question what we had always known to be true. This has not changed. As we continue our search for great teachings and thoughts about camp and youth development every day we learn something new and argue about past perceptions. 

What makes this so interesting is there is no right answer or perfect camp. The thought leaders in youth development, motivation, business, and psychology don’t always agree. The more we read Sir Ken Robinson, Daniel Pink, Alfie Kohn, Paul Tough, Stuart Brown, Seth Godin, or Jim Collins the more we find disagreement. The same is true of great camp thinkers and great camps. 

The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing.

– Socrates

What we have come to love and search for is not the perfect camp, but great ideas. Camp people, that believe that camps change lives and want the best for kids, passionately articulating the value of competition at camp, progressive programming, running only summer programming, or any idea that they believe makes camp better. 

We hope to find more of these ideas, from more passionate people and share different perspectives to help make better informed opinions. We would love to hear your passion.

Every truth has two sides; it is as well to look at both, before we commit ourselves to either.

-Aesop

-Jack

Why Pay For Training?

We asked ourselves this for a long time. Why pay for an outside trainer? With trainers costing anywhere from $500-$4,000, a day. How can that much money be worth a day of training? I have heard a handful of decent reasons like, getting staff buy in, hearing new ideas, and giving staff new tools, but that is still a ton of money! You could buy a new canoe, lots of new archery supplies, or even a used car. 

Scott Arizela, one of the best trainers in the business, gave us the best reasoning for hiring an outside trainer. If after a day of training, even one counselor is able to connect with just one more camper its easily worth it; in terms of impact and finically. And thats the bare minimum!

Laura leading a Training At YMCA Camp Seymour

Laura leading a Training At YMCA Camp Seymour

I'm sure bringing in great trainers like Scott, Steve Maquire, Chris Thurber, Travis and Beth Allison, or others gives every staff member tools to connect with more than one camper. 

If in one day a 5% of  counselors can learn tools to turn one camper per summer from a one year camper to life time campers, 4000, 5000, maybe 6000 dollars would easily be worth it. More on the dollar values of retention. If trainers can have a positive effect on retention, which I believe each of the ones I mentioned can, is it finically irresponsible to not hire them?

-Jack

3 Easy Ways to Bring Camper Driven Play to Cam

Playing At Seymour

The best camps in the country are finding ways to let campers have self directed play. This can seem overwhelming and difficult in an increasingly structured camp environment, but here are 3 simple ways to give campers more freedom to play at camp.   

1) FOTAY

Is an acronym developed by Micheal Brandwien for Figure Out The Activity Yourself. Brilliantly simple, the idea is to give campers a bunch of loose parts and let them figure out a game or fun activity. Jason Smith at Camp Kitaki likes to start the activity explaining that he forgot the rules but still has all these pieces if only the kids could figure it out.

2) Natural Play Areas

Some of the best camps we saw had designated areas for campers to play. These natural, or unstructured, play areas are a great way to give kids freedom but with in the confines of a safe environment. The key like with FOTAY isn’t in how nice the materials are but just having loose parts and letting kids lead the exploration. Two of the best examples we saw were at Vanderkamp and Camp Kitaki. In both places staff were trained to participate in the play and supervise, but let the campers lead and make decisions. 

3) Let Your Staff Play

One of the problems with bringing self directed play to camp is that young staff members grew up in a world deprived of free time or neighborhoods to play in. Haelynne at Camp Collins struggled with this idea and developed a brilliant solution. She took her leadership staff to a near by park and spent 2 hours just letting them play, with no supplies or toys. At first they thought she was crazy, but after a few minutes the magic started to take shape. At the end of 2 hours they had created a whole new world and could have played for ever. Giving staff the permission to play, and helping them empathize with campers struggling to “just play” allowed them to develop the tools they individually needed to be successful.

-Jack 

 

 

Asking Why... Finding the Right Fit

Vanderkamp Trap Door

Laura and I just got home from our third visit to Vanderkamp, our home for the summer. We spent the weekend planning staff training, playing with James (the director)’s kids, and most of all questioning James and everything he has built. The program at Vanderkamp is different than any in the country and focuses on providing a nutrient rich, safe environment, where the campers are free to make as many decisions as possible. Campers are never rushed, points of tension are removed, and kids choose how to spend their time as well as who to spend it with. It is a model we have never seen, we love, and often can’t believe is possible. So our natural response is to question every aspect of it.

Can kids just hang out if they want to? Why do you offer outrageous activities? What do you mean kids could choose to play gaga all day if they want to? What if kids are having fun but the activity period is over do we have to make them stop? Why do kids have to go to meals if its all about choice? Why are kids supervised at all times, does that restrict campers freedom? And a million more.

James loves the questioning. He calmly talks us through the “why” of each aspect of camp or we as a group figure out a better way things could be structured. It is an amazing way to spend hours examining camp and finding a better way, but speaks more to James’s willingness to constantly improve than anything we bring to the table.

We love working for James because he encourages this kind of questioning and is happy to examine why things are done the way they are. He is open to be convinced of a better way or to examine a process and decide the current process is best the way it is. Searching for great teachings rather than a great teacher.

At Vanderkamp we are learning about a radically different camp model, but more than that we are hoping to leave with renewed sense of self reflection and willingness to accept new ideas.

-Jack