Summer camp

[Ceinwen]

For those of you with older children in daycare, do you put them in different summer camps to try and break up the monotony a little bit? I'm thinking about putting my older dd (age 7.5 this summer) into a few different things to make the summer a bit more enjoyable.

I'm a nurse, and I work shift, so the kids are only in daycare a couple days a week. Just wanted to get some input! Thanks!

[aelf]

I put my (6 yo) daughter in summer camp. Last year (the summer between K and 1st) she spent a week or on each end of the summer with grandparents, we had a couple week vacations in the middle of the summer, and the rest was at one camp. She tends to prefer same-old-same-old so I don't do the assortment of different camps that some parents do.

This year (summer between 1st and 2nd) she'll be spending about a month at the beginning of summer on vacation & with grandparents, then about 6 weeks of summer camp, and another 2-3 weeks of hanging out and perhaps visiting grandparents.

She's pretty set on staying with one camp. But that's her personality. That said, the camps do different things. It's not the same stuff day in and day out. The camp she's attending this summer has theme weeks, the camp she attended last year had different special activities to break things up. And the kids change as well, which adds some variety.

[34me]

My guys went to the same camp for the most part. You could pay by the week and they had differrerent themes for each week as well. The only exception was that depending on the age they went swimming on a certain day and every Thursday was field trip day. I did take my ds#1 out for a week every summer for hockey camp but that was about all the variety they got.

[christophersmom]

DS has a few things that he wants to do so he will go to a bunch of different camps, broken up with three long weekends at the beach and then a summer beach trip at the end of the summer.

He is going to a local space camp, a High Touch High Tech Science Camp, a local College Soccer Camp, a local college basketball camp (tentative), a BMX camp, and then a few weeks at our gym. He enjoys doing lots of different camps, so I think he will enjoy it. He got to pick what camps he wanted to do out of a few brochures.

[cchrissyy]

Last year my 7yo went to the same outdoor ed science camp for all 11 weeks of summer break. He'd done their spring camp and a few weeks of summer before, so I knew it was a good match for him, and I really wanted the familiarity and stability of one camp to minimize the transitions and new environments of the summertime. but it really went downhill by the end, maybe he was bored, maybe he needed more structure from his camp days and couldn't hold it togetehr as well in august as in june, I don't know, but anyway, this year we are doing a few weeks each of 3 different camps.