Summer camp activity ideas

Summer camp can get a little tiresome if you do not have enough interesting outdoor activities packed into your itinerary.

For example camp fires are a must-have in summer camp but good planning and interesting activities have to be built around them to keep the kids interested. You can tell really scary ghost stories around the camp fire. And so as they have their hot dogs and marshmallows you can keep them on edge with the right kind of ghost story. With the World Wide Web you should have no excuse for telling a boring uninteresting ghost story that does not move anybody.

Children are full of energy and you must make sure that there are plenty of activities for them to burn off all that energy. Nature hiking is a popular summer camp activity that does exactly this. There are many different ways of doing this. You can walk together in a group to a selected location or you can divide into groups and do it like a race. You can even tie it in with some sort of treasure hunt.

Scavenger hunts are also very popular and can be done on their own around the area where you have set camp. You can hide various small items and get the kids to find them. Again this is an activity that will help drain the excess energy of the kids during summer.

What is summer camp without fishing? It is useful to turn as many of the activities as you possibly can into educational experiences. For example you can teach them how to clean out the fish and cook in an open fire.

Incidentally another activity that can be a valuable educational lesson is making a list of a dozen or so different bugs and then sending the children out to identify and capture them.