Pro Tips: Preparing For Camp

Our final entry of the Pro Tips blog series is about preparing your camper for camp. We covered labeling, packing and letter writing, but we have even more great tips to help your camper get ready for an amazing summer, and lifetime, at Camp Chi. Hopefully these strategies and tips will help you feel confident and ready to send your camper to camp.

Staying Away From Home

For many campers at camp, this is their first time staying away from home. For some campers, this is a daunting experience, but we have some tips to make it a bit easier. Our biggest recommendation is to practice sleeping over at someone else’s house before camp starts.

It can be at a relative’s or a friend’s house, but a sleepover will help your camper get used to sleeping in a different environment, with other people in the room and will give them the confidence to sleep successfully in a cabin at camp.

Set Goals

We also recommend setting goals with your campers for the summer. Camp is an awesome place with lots of activities many first-time campers have never done before. Sometimes campers may be apprehensive to try new activities, so setting goals beforehand will help them have the right attitude to attempt something new. Writing letters to your camper to check in on their progress toward their goals and to provide encouragement to keep going definitely helps. Reminding them of their goals keeps them engaged, gets them to continue trying new things and shows you are interested in what your camper is doing.

Let The Small Stuff Go

It is often said that a minute at camp is like an hour at home, and a day at camp is like a week outside of camp. So much happens in a day and campers do so many different things, and things don’t always go as planned. We train around improvising and adapting so we can overcome these obstacles. We teach our staff how to determine if a situation is a big deal or not and we try to help our parents and campers learn the same thing. Our first priority is always safety and well-being of everyone at camp, so please remember if your camper is having a good time and is safe, then they are ok. While we do our best to avoid it, there may be times where your camper gets a bad mosquito bite, scrapes their knee, or even forgets to brush their hair. A motto we like to recommend is “this too shall pass”, meaning we will do our best to take care of your camper’s knotty hair or scraped knee, and get them back out into the fun of camp.

We post pictures daily of our campers to our website. Keep in mind the photos we post are just a glimpse into a moment, and not a window into the whole experience. If your camper isn’t giving their usual smile, or has a weird look in the photo, try not to jump to conclusions about their whole experience. Often times if a camper does not look their best in one picture, they will look great in another and it’s just the moment the photo was taken – maybe they were intensely focused on the activity, someone is doing something silly off camera and they are laughing at it, or someone’s eyes were closed in another option.

Encourage Asking for Help

Camp is a great place to grow as a person. We often hear that campers come home and are much more adventurous and independent. What we want to stress it that being independent doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help. We hire a dedicated group of staff who come to camp to provide the best care and experience for your campers. It is important that campers know they can go to their counselor, specialist, village leader or full-time staff member if they need anything. We encourage our campers to share with staff regularly, so please help them know that we are there to fully support their success, and to come to us if they need anything.

These pro tips are meant to help you and your camper prepare for summer. It is can be very nerve racking for first-time campers to come up to camp and equally nerve racking for the parents. It is ok to be nervous and remember that camp is a place to have fun and be yourself. These Pro Tips are meant to help the transition into summer be much easier for them.