Helping Parents Prepare Their Child For Summer Camp

As camp professionals and as parents ourselves we know how important our child’s privacy is, so we’d like to give you some helpful advice when it comes to sharing critical information that would allow us to better serve your children at camp.

The American Camp Association (ACA) and Bob Ditter have put together a great video for parents with very helpful advice on this very subject, titled – Ready for Camp: Sharing Personal Information About Your Child With Camp Professionals.

Ready for Camp: What Parents Need to Know, with Bob Ditter @ Yahoo! Video

 
Bob Ditter is a child, adolescent, and family therapist in Boston, Massachusetts. He consults with youth agencies throughout the United States, including the American Camp Association (ACA), Girl Scouts of the USA, YMCA, Salvation Army, JCCA, and many others. He has visited over 500 camps in the United States, writes for Camping Magazine, the official publication of ACA, and has authored many books and training videos for camp professionals.

We hope you find this video helpful and interesting. Please visit campparents.org for more helpful and informative getting ready for camp videos and for more Camp Friendship videos visit our YouTube summer camp page .

Because of Camp. . .

Because of Camp. . . I’ve made lifelong friends

Because of Camp. . . I met my wife

Because of Camp. . .I have a fabulous job sharing this experience with children all over the world.

These are just some of the things camp has done for me but there’s so many other great benefits of camp. This isn’t me just talking either, studies have been performed by the American Camp Association and its partners to prove it, just see for yourself – http://www.acacamps.org/research/enhance/directions.php.

If you’d like to hear from more impressive names than myself, just listen to what Emma Roberts, Hill Harper, Lisa Loeb, Kerri Strug, Michal DeLorenzo, Blair Underwood, and many more have to say about their camp experiences.

Camp Friendship, Where Have You Been?

It seems I’ve been slacking. We have been back from our Tri-State Conference for a week and I’m just now sitting down to tell you how it went. Sam our Assistant Director, Sherri our Registrar, and myself the Marketing Director headed out to Atlantic City for the annual Tri-State ACA Conference. Let me simply say we had a great time. We met with some old friends, made some new friends and attended some great sessions. Great speakers such as Dr. Wendy Mogul author of “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” and Erin Gruwell educator and author of “The Freedom Writers Diary” took some time to speak to us during the four day event. It really was an inspiring event but this is not the part that’s important to our camp families the important part is that we learned a ton and we are back with a million new ideas to make camp even better.

Speaking for our Assistant/Program Director Sam, she has some great new program/activity ideas to incorporate with some old favorites this summer. If I know Sam she’s been planning some new and fun activities since the end of last summer but now she’s really ready for anything.

Did I mention we saw GIANT snow flakes in Atlantic City!?

This summer will be the first summer we require our new staff to start their training prior to their early arrival at camp. This is something we are very happy and proud of doing this year. Our staff members will be working on a series of tests to prepare them for what to expect and what we expect from a camp counselor. This is all on top of the on camp training they will receive prior to their arrival at camp. While this little project has been in the works prior to our visit to the conference this is something that was reinforced by other camps. We all expect great things from our staff members, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Our Registrar has been looking into way to streamline our registration and online registration process and we are certainly making some headway in that area. We hope to have some news before registration opens for our 2010 summer.

Well in the spirit of keeping short and to the point let me close by saying that we are very excited for the upcoming summer. We have a large amount of high quality returning staff and we are all ready to make this one of our best summers ever.

Cris

Note: Next month we will be sending out an April edition of our Friendship Times Newsletter but only by email. So if you’d like to receive it please be sure to visit the Camp Friendship website and sign up to receive email messages from us.