Recreation Guy

Whether it’s a theme meal, theme day or a theme week, themes are a big part of many summer camps. For good reason, too. It’s fun to have activities, special events, crafts, food and/or decor that ties into a theme. It’s like an ongoing, well planned birthday party.

Every recreation department teaches sports to kids, whether by their own staff or through contract instructors. And why wouldn’t they, the benefits for children are many. But what if you want to offer a sport and don’t have an instructor? Maybe you can’t find a qualified contract instructor to teach the skills and nobody on [...]

At the conference I attended last week there was an Expo. The expo hall was filled with companies vying for our attention, commitments to buy and business cards. As I meandered through the aisles and aisles of vendors I was specifically looking for programming products. Unfortunately there were only a couple of vendors that offered [...]

Today I was at the CPRS conference and as I saw people I knew I couldn’t help but smile. After a day of workshops and social gatherings I thought about how lucky I was to be in such a great industry. When I go to work I am juiced (on most days) about seeing my [...]

Its been raining off and on here in Northern California so I decided to dig up some of my reference books and find some rainy day activities that I knew were good and have used in the past. Below is an excerpt from a book called Camp Program Ideas, edited and compiled by Janet Gibson, [...]

The other day I was talking on the phone with a friend of mine, Susan, who is the director of an after school YMCA site. We were discussing programming, as we always do, and she mentioned that she started running a sign language program.
I took a semester of sign language in college. I really enjoyed [...]

It won’t be too long before summer staff interviews begin, if they haven’t already. You most likely have an interview sheet already created with specific questions on them. Here are some that you might want to add to that sheet, if they are not already on there.

I see a lot of parks and recreation department and YMCA brochures. Most of them have one thing in common, the cover is not as engaging as it could be. I would show you examples but I don’t want anyone getting offended. Just take a look at yours or the city recreation departments and YMCAs [...]

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period of this time around.

When the youth programs supervisor told me she wanted to do an after school program called Spinners I was intrigued.
“Spinners? Is that where you spin the paper and drop paint on the paper making cool designs.”
“No Curt, it’s a jump rope program.”
“Huh? You want kids to jump rope for an hour of after school programming?”
“Exactly. [...]