Welcome 1-weekers!
Everyone was very excited to prepare for our 1-weekers’ arrivals after our pancake breakfast this morning, PJ’s in all! With some morning pancake energy, campers and counselors cleaned all through camp to make sure everything was looking beautiful for our new arrivals- but what would cleaning camp be without singing and games? Zebraconious Tag, or tagging the back of other campers’ and counselors’ calves, was among the first. Team Rock/Paper/Scissors, better known at camp as Elves/Giants/Wizards, was next in the lineup. Last but not certainly not least, The Inclusion Game- where campers are given a category or characteristic that everyone else in the group treats them as during the game. At the end of the round, campers try to figure out what word they were being treated as. Things like lonely, ignored, funny, celebrity, bully, and weird were some of the topics campers discussed after the game- what did it feel like to be treated this way? Why do stereotypes sometimes affect how people treat others? How can we change this? Campers had some amazing responses about how they’ve dealt with bullies, personalities different from their own, and making friends.
Tonight’s midsession campfire for our 2-weekers and opening campfire for our 1-weekers started with some energetic renditions of Sloopy and other campfire songs, and moved into some great camp-wide games! Jen challenged us to putting ourselves all in birthday order in just a few minutes- and we did it on the first try! (We also learned we have a lot of same-day camp birthdays!) Next, we had to introduce ourselves, or reintroduce ourselves, to everyone in camp in a minute and a half! Our new 1-weekers did awesome! We look forward to starting programs and activities with them tomorrow, and getting to know them better along the way.