Life is the Bubbles… Under the Sea!

It was Under the Sea week here in Preschool Camp last week, and boy was it “off the hook”!

At our Long Beach site, our kids discovered and developed their sense of “ruach” (spirit/heart) during this fun week. While playing at the water table we talked about being kind to each other as we splashed and cooled down together with our counselors! Later during Art, we decided that nobody liked a crabby camper, but everyone loved making paper plate crabs. We each let our creative spirit take over, making each of our crabs personal and unique!

Keeping cool and having fun at our water table!

Our campers also extended their ruach towards plants and nature this week by returning to the garden to clean, pull weeds, and water and prepare the soil for planting. We can’t wait to see the results! The week concluded with Dag (Fish) Shabbat and talking about how wonderful and beautiful fish can be!

At Merrick/Bellmore this week, we crafted beautiful fishbowls and each gave a starfish a home! Sea Turtle Pies were a big hit, and everyone agreed that the pudding, cool whip, and caramel syrup tasted delicious! We had even more fun celebrating all things under the sea when we made our sand art projects. Everyone especially enjoyed pouring colored sand through a funnel and into plastic bottles to watch a rainbow form right before their eyes!

What better way to celebrate fish than swimming?

Under the Sea carried into Shabbat when we celebrated Sea Creature Shabbat! We played lots of fun games like Feed the Shark Toss and Pin the Tail on the Whale. We even took out our parachute and played games to The Little Mermaid and Finding Nemo!

In Oceanside, our week started with everyone showing off their biggest and brightest smiles for picture day! Those smiles stayed on our faces as we celebrated Under the Sea week in Art. We made sand art and an underwater snow globe full of sand, glitter, and water. Everyone loved shaking them up and watching the glitter fly!

Underwater Snow Globes!

The theme of the week continued in Judaica where we learned all about Jonah and the whale. In music too we kept with our theme by singing songs about Nemo the fish! And of course playing in the pool and in the sprinklers made us feel like real fish in the water!

Once again this week, all of our Pre-K campers took a trip to our Campgrounds! Our campers from Long Beach played a great round of mini-golf, while the Merrick/Bellmore group had fun running some “wacky relays”, and the Oceanside campers had fun painting ceramic starfish! Everyone had a yummy lunch and a nice cool dip in the pool.

The highlight of our trip though was seeing the Mama Doni Band perform!! Wow! We had so much fun singing and dancing along to the music with all of Junior Camp.  Everyone’s energy was high as we jumped up and down, waved our hands in the air, and even played air guitars! What can we say? “Each little clam here know how to jam here, Under the Sea!”

Having a blast with Mama Doni!!

Want to see some great photos of our summer? Head on over to Friedberg JCC Early Childhood or Friedberg JCC Summer Camps on Facebook, or to our Bunk 1 website! We’ve even taken it up a notch this summer by joining Instagram. You can see our “vintage” camp photos under the username Friedbergjcc.

Have a great week everyone, and don’t forget to “just keep swimming!”