CCNS Summer Camp 2021

 

           

 

 

Camp CCNS invites you to join us for 7 weeks of summer fun! Keeping in the spirit of our philosophy, where children learn through play, our camp will provide a range of experiences each week that cultivate the whole child.

Camp is open to children ages 2-5 (rising 3s through rising Kindergarteners) and will take place completely outside in our beautiful outdoor classroom & playground. Camp hours are from 9:30-1 pm Monday-Friday and costs $275 a week with the exception of Memorial Day week which costs $220. Children bring a snack and lunch with them. 

Each week of camp will provide a variety of play-based activities and creative projects with plenty of time to cook in the mud kitchen, conduct a concert in the music center and sail the seven seas from the top of our playground tower. Themes change each week but will most likely include Action Art, Kitchen Capers, Around the World, Gravitational Force, Clay, Dough & Slime, Up in the Air: Ball & Balloons and Sticks & Rocks-Nature Art! A typical day includes songs, stories, building, painting, potions, tie-dye, tinkering and of course lots of water play! 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                

We will be following all of our COVID 19 protocols from the school year as well as our camp from last summer. CCNS adheres to the guidelines set by the State, OEC, CDC, and the local health department, and will continue to meet the standards should they change. Additionally, our camp will be staffed with only current staff members to reduce the number of teachers/counselors to which the children will be exposed. Our maximum enrollment each week is 20 children per the current state guidelines. 

Please see below for our full camp schedule and pricing. Availability is limited. Please contact our Educational Director Dana Gorman at educ.dir@ccnsct.org for enrollment or additional questions. Hope to see you there! 

CCNS Camp Schedule: $275 a week, 9:30-1

  • Week 1: May 31-June 4(no camp on the 31st, $220 for this week only)
  • Week 2: June 7-11(currently full, waitlist open)
  • Week 3: June 14-18(currently full, waitlist open)
  • Week 4: June 21-25
  • Week 5: June 28-July 2
  • Week 6: July 5-9
  • Week 7: July 12-16

Making Faces in the Threes

We’ve been “making faces” in the Threes, which is a fun way to help children at this age identify and discover more about how their eyes, noses and mouths work.

We started by talking about what features you might find on a face. We looked at our faces in the mirror and identified things that are largely the same on all our faces (like noses, ears, lips, and eyebrows) and things that are different (like eye color, hair color and hair type). On our easel, we created faces using shape magnets, and we used play dough to form the features of a face, then talked about our choices.  We all agreed that “circles work best for eyes!”

We next read the book  “Let’s Make Faces” by Hancock Priven and used a range of materials and loose parts to create faces.  And then we looked at Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s famous “Four Seasons” paintings, in which he created faces made up of fruit, vegetables, flowers and plants, and we created our own faces inspired by his art work.

You might have some fun making faces with your child at home – I hear you can do a lot with a pancake and some berries!

Playing (and learning) in the snow!

When the children arrived at school last Monday, they were incredibly excited to see our playground covered in snow!  They had read Willow and The Snow Day Dance by Denise Brennan Nelson on Friday, and all went home to follow the book’s directions on how to make it snow… so they felt some ownership of the winter scene that greeted them.

Normally in the Fours, we begin our day outside for about 30 minutes, but this day we stayed out for well over an hour and a half.  It was a beautiful day, and because we go outside every single day, our students are well-trained to dress properly for rain, cold or snow.

It was not until the children started to need the bathroom or to feel hungry that we felt the need to go inside.  At CCNS, we have the flexibility to vary our schedules based on the needs of the children as well as exciting events that might occur – and what could be more exciting than the first snowfall of the season?!

Were we “just playing” for an hour and a half at the expense of our scheduled activities inside?

Absolutely.  But, we were also…

  • discovering the physics of creating sledding paths in deep powder.  Why weren’t we going fast? Why wasn’t it slippery? How did this change as more children came down the path?  Why were some starting to go faster than others? 
  • practicing the negotiation and problem-solving involved with sled turn-taking.
  • finding ice in various shapes and thicknesses all over the playground.  What is inside this ice?  What happens when I drop it?
  • stirring, mixing and packing snow in our outdoor kitchen; creating recipes while learning about the properties of snow and how they can be changed.
  • exercising and strengthening our bodies as we climbed the big hill over and over again, trudged through the thick snow or tried to push our way down slides packed heavy with snow.
  • excitedly and descriptively articulating our discoveries to our teachers and each other.

And, importantly, we were enjoying the beauty of nature, breathing the fresh air and experiencing how highly our CCNS parents and teachers value being outside and having time to explore.

We have a wonderful, large outdoor classroom at CCNS that is ever-changing… from falling leaves or a new snowfall, to a new raised garden bed built by the Fours, to the playground redesign in the works that will add new natural features to make this incredible space even more inviting for extended play and discovery.

Giving children the opportunity to spend more time in nature has garnered a good deal of press recently, and a strong body of research stresses the importance of this kind of experience for children.  It is reassuring to know that the children of CCNS are already benefiting from a rich, natural environment and from a learning community that values this important play.

Dana M. Gorman

Educational Director

 

To read a few recent articles on the value of outdoor play and learning, click here, here or here!