The Fun Never Ends!

Summer may be beginning to wind down, but our little campers are keeping the energy high. Last week was so much fun, full of laughter, singing… and just a little bit of dirt!

This was the last week of camp for our Merrick/Bellmore children.  Even though we were sad to say goodbye we made sure to make the most of the last few days with our friends. We were so busy having fun; the time seemed to have completely flown by.

In science this week we held balloon races and enjoyed trying to predict which balloons would fly the fastest and win the race! Our Yoga skills all came together this week as we practiced all of our poses to music. We tried to do them faster and faster to keep up with the song, and everyone did a great job.

Everyone noticed how far we had come with our swimming skills as well.  The swim reports that went home were great evidence of the hard work we put in to learning all summer! Our two’s had so much fun on the water slide this summer; they can’t wait to start swimming next year. We also had huge success at our Tye-Dye T-shirt Party as everyone turned plain white shirts into ones full of fascinating colors!

We're all such great swimmers!

We topped off our final week with a super carnival celebration! Our parents got to join us in all of the fun as we bounced in giant bounce houses, had our faces painted, tried our hand at bowling and spin art and of course ate some delicious cotton candy and ice cream! What a perfect way to end a perfect summer. We can’t wait to see our friends again next year!

Our Oceanside campers still have one more week to play, and they are certainly making the most of their time left at camp! Last Tuesday was full of silly fun as everyone came to camp in their most fashionable pajamas. Miss Diane taught us a song in celebration called “The Pajama Song” and the boys and girls each got their own verse to sing. It was so much fun to see everyone (even our counselors!) in their pajamas.

Is there anything cuter than Princesses in Pajamas?! 

On Wednesday we had a special treat when our very own Miss Brooke and Miss Michelle sang for us. We were excited to cheer and dance along with them. For their grand finale, they sang a beautiful song from the Broadway show, Wicked. Their performance was so wonderful; we all agree they should be up on the big stage!

Miss Michelle and Miss Brooke performing for us!

Thursday was all hands on for our Oceanside Campers. We got to make cool cloud catchers in nature, and then we built rocket ships in art! Everyone also continued practicing our dance moves with Miss Ronnie.  Our week concluded with a wonderful performance of Willy Wonka, put on by the JCC Theater Camp!

Our little Long Beach campers had some good clean fun discovering the joy of dirt. Knowing that research shows that playing outdoors (particularly in the dirt) increases happiness, reduces anxiety and enhances learning, our campers spent the week reminding themselves that grime is good.

In Art Extensions, Ms. Fran and the children created their own sandy play-dough by adding cream of tartar to boiling water, cornstarch and sand. Everyone had a great time kneading the mixture and then designing sandcastles.  Plastic decorations and colored chalk-dust added a nice touch.  The children had big smiles and everyone agreed that indoor sandcastles were definitely worthwhile - especially when they won't wash away in the surf!

Our Mud Face!

We took the fun outside after that, and our very little ones dipped their feet in glue and then made a mural of their sandy footprints.  It was cold, sticky, messy and gooey, but great fun! In Gardening, our older campers discovered how much fun could be had with the simplest ingredients - dirt and water. The children giggled while they used their hands to mix water into soil, which they had dug from the garden and placed in a sensory table.  After they had created their own supply of mud, the real fun began. Mud-men, a mud face, mud noodles, and a mud house were all designed as the children let their imaginations run wild! 

We love Mud!

 Even though we are sad to see camp coming to a close, it’s clear that our campers are still having a ball! Make sure to catch more great pictures and updates on our Friedberg JCC Early Childhood and Friedberg JCCSummer Camps Facebook pages, or on our Bunk 1 website! Have a great week everybody!

And The Winner Is….

 Everyone!!

After watching all of the talented athletes competing in this year’s Olympic games, our littlest campers couldn’t wait to get in on the action! Lucky for us, it was Maccabee Week here at the JCC. We all found out that playing sports and running relay races is not only a really good time, but it makes us healthy and feel good too!

Our Long Beach campers prepared for the Maccabee Games by creating their own torches, banners and medals with Ms. Fran. Orange and yellow tissue paper made great flames, and paper plates painted with gold sparkly paint turned into beautiful medals! Our banners included Olympic rings, Jewish stars, and our summertime ocean theme- fish. Everyone was so proud to sport them in our building!

One of our littlest campers making his gold medal!

One of the highlights of the week in Long Beach was when our counselors taught us about the different types of sports that have been played for thousands of years. We also reviewed the skills of a great athlete, and talked about how helping other members of your team and being a good winner are just as important as practice and skill. We then put our new knowledge to the test by going outside to try the diskus throw, shot put, backwards relay, and long jump. Later, everyone came into our auditorium and cheered each other on as we held our gymnastics and judo events. Of course, no Maccabee Games would be complete without the reciting of the National Anthem and Hatikvah!

In Oceanside, all of our campers had so much fun running relay races with our friends. We also had a great time in Yoga, and this week Miss Sharon had us pose as different circus animals. Our swimming skills are improving daily, and after seeing the talented divers at the Olympic Games, we were so excited to have Miss Vanessa help us jump from the diving board!

We'll be ready for the Olympic diving team in no time! 

Our Oceanside campers had a great time learning about the Maccabees and where they came from- Israel!  We learned a fun song about the Maccabees in music with Miss Diane, and later she taught us all about Israel in Judaica. We read a story about Sammy the Spider’s first trip to Israel, and we learned that Israel is a desert. Everyone made their own Sally the Camels to represent the camels that live there!

At Merrick/Bellmore, everyone had fun celebrating the Maccabee Games and the Olympics. The threes and fours practiced their soccer skills by dribbling the ball and slowly pushing it towards the net. They also practiced kicking the ball from further away, aiming for the net. Some of the threes were even able to dribble the basketball with two hands and shoot hoops!

Hey, Kobe Bryant! Check out our moves! 

In Yoga, the children turned their bodies into different ocean animals, including octopus, dolphins, and starfish. Some of our threes and fours would make Michael Phelps proud as we continue to practice their water skills. We are now able to put our heads in the water, and even swim under the water! Everyone made torches and banners to show their team spirit, and the twos especially enjoyed pasting sport stickers all over their banners. We had a wonderful parade with our banners and ended our week with a Shabbat celebration full of singing and dancing!

Of course all of our Pre-K campers had a great time at the campgrounds again last Friday! Some of us got to make beautiful sun catchers, while those of us who didn’t get to make teddy bears last week had so much fun stuffing our new friends. Yummy macaroni and cheese made a scrumptious lunch. But as always, splashing around and practicing our swimming skills in the big pool was the real highlight of the day! We can’t wait until we can be there every day next summer!

We love the big pool!

Check out our new cuddly friends!

This was certainly a winning week! Stay up to date on our Friedberg JCC Early Childhood and Friedberg JCC Summer Camps Facebook pages, and check out tons of great photos on Bunk 1! Happy Camping!

Wild N Wacky Week!

We can’t believe last week was already the halfway point in our summer here at the Friedberg JCC Early Childhood camps. It has been such an incredible summer so far! We have already danced the hula, sang along to the Beach Boys, did cool science experiments, celebrated our country, and made lots of new friends! We brought in our second session with a really Wild N Wacky week full of silly games, funny art projects, and really cool activities to learn more about the ocean and the crazy creatures that live in it…

Our children in Oceanside really “kicked” off the week by having fun in Judo class on Monday. Everybody really enjoyed tumbling around on the mats, it is so different from our Yoga class where we are learning about balance and concentration. The concentration we learned in Yoga certainly came in handy during sports this week when we played volleyball and hockey in our gym. We had so much fun playing with our friends, nobody even cared who won the game!

During “Wacky Art Day,” we made crazy designs by covering marbles in paint and letting them roll around on paper. It was so cool! Later in the week we did a really interesting Ocean Science activity. Everyone had fun experimenting with how different objects float or sink in our own “oceans” and made a chart to keep track of our discoveries!

Checking out our science experiment

Over in Long Beach, we filled our “Wild N Wacky” week with crazy creatures from under the sea! Some of the coolest things we find in the ocean are seashells, which come in wacky shapes and crazy colors. During art, Ms. Fran gave us empty water bottles to fill with colored water, a little oil, glitter, and lots of small shells. We had so much fun tipping them back and forth and watching the water run over the shells!

We can do so much fun stuff with hard pasta shells!

In Little Chefs this week, Ms. Michelle had us talk about the differences between hard, uncooked pasta shells, and soft, cooked ones.  We then dipped the cooked pasta in colored water, added tomato (for coral) and green peppers (for seaweed) and made ourselves a Seaside Pasta Salad! Later in the week some of our older campers actually walked down to the boardwalk to see the beach. We brought bread to feed to the gulls and learned that birds like to eat shellfish. All of us agreed that we would rather eat our challah!

In Merrick/Bellmore, Wild N Wacky Week really was just that! Everyone looked so silly on Backwards Day and Silly Sock Day, and we were all able to have a good laugh at our own craziness! In art we all made silly monkey visors to keep the sun out of our eyes, and in Yoga we kept up the silly animal theme as we all tried wacky animal poses. Check out this little frog:

Such an impressive little frog! 

In science, our three’s and four’s were all astounded by the amazing rainbows we were able to create out of different colored food! How wacky is that?! Everyone agreed though that the best part of Wild N Wacky Week was making our wacky dessert. We created upside down ice cream cones with chocolate faces. They were very funny and unbelievably delicious!

Our Pre-K campers went back to the Henry Kaufman Campgrounds again this week, and had a wonderful time as always. Being outdoors in the summer is so much fun, and the heat gave us a great reason to have fun splashing in the pool. Everyone enjoyed taking our activities outdoors, and some of us even got to build our own teddy bears (completely with JCC Camp t-shirts)!

Our very own JCC Teddy Bears 

Wow was that great! We can’t even imagine what the rest of the summer has in store for us, but we know it will be so much fun! Check out more on our Friedberg JCC Early Childhood and Friedberg JCC Summer Camps Facebook pages, and don’t forget to look for your camper’s smiling face on Bunk1! See you next week everybody!

Let’s all go on a Surfin’ Safari!

Last week was Island Favorites week here at the Friedberg JCC Early Childhood Camps. The Beach Boys set the soundtrack for a rockin’ good time as we all brought the fun of the Islands to camp!

While our Merrick/Bellmore kids had a ball learning animal poses in Yoga and doing forward rolls in Judo, it was our Island celebrations that stole the show! In Art, everyone loved creating “Aloha” picture frames and having our counselors take lovely photos to insert in them. We also made Island visors and learned all about palm trees and coconuts!

We finished up a week of Island snow cones and blue Jell-O treats that reminded us of the ocean by having a big beach party! Everyone had fun doing lobster and crab dance moves, having a fish toss and jelly fish jump, and some parachute play with beach balls. When the Beach Boys came on we all had a great time doing the limbo dance!

Parachute Fun at our Beach Party!

Over in Oceanside the Island fun kicked off with a Long Island Dance-A-Thon! Everyone donned Hawaiian leis and showed off their dance moves to some of our Island favorites. We even played a riveting game of freeze dance to get everyone up and having a good time!

The rest of the week was full of fun Island themed crafts and snacks. Blue Jell-O provided the perfect backdrop to make edible aquariums with starfish sprinkles (some of us even added whipped cream on top to make them extra delicious).  Then in Art, Miss Ronnie helped us decorate t-shirts with all kinds of cool Island stencils, colorful fabric paint, and lots of sparkles!

Blue Jell-O looks just like the an aquarium!

Our Long Beach campers had so much on their Island vacation. We brought some Bob Marley into our Beach Boys mix for a really groovy musical backdrop this week. We also had our very own Hawaiian luau! Everyone danced the hula in grass skirts and flower leis (complete with fruit loops in between the flowers), which we made ourselves, and ate lots of fresh pineapple. We also made our own edible aquariums out of pancakes and blue frosting!

The highlight of everyone’s week at Long Beach was when we decided to head outside and make our own erupting volcano! We brought out some bottles of Diet Coke and a few rolls of mint flavored Mentos and got ready to watch a real “volcanic” reaction. Want to see what we saw? Check out this awesome video of our experiment:

Boy, the Island life sure is fun! We can’t wait to see what’s in store for us this week at camp. Keep checking in with us on our Friedberg JCC Early Childhood and Friedberg JCC Summer Camps Facebook pages, and don’t forget to check Bunk 1 for great camp photos all summer long!

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!”

Hello Summer!!

Wow! What an incredible, exciting, very busy few weeks we have had! Our wonderful school year went out with a bang as we proudly watched our Preschool students put on caps and gowns and receive their diplomas. We will miss them all dearly, but are so excited for them to begin Kindergarten this fall!

Oceanside graduates are just adorable!

While we were sad to see the school year come to a close, everybody was bursting with excitement to start the summer. After a great Mini Camp session, our full summer Camp kicked off to an amazing start!

We started off our summer by getting to know our new friends and learning all about how much fun camp can be. Everyone had a great time making beautiful art projects, playing on our playgrounds, and singing camp songs! We all had so much fun, we couldn’t wait to see what was in store for us for the July 4^th Celebration week, we just knew it was going to be great…

And great it was!

Over in Oceanside, our littlest campers had a great time meeting new friends and getting to know their counselors.  In art, we took seashells and made beautiful picture frames to bring home to our families. We also got to bring home plants after planting in our classroom terrariums; we are so excited to watch them grow!

Our Oceanside kids also had the best time swimming in the pool with our counselors and friends. What a perfect way to cool down in this summer heat! Our favorite part of the week though was celebrating Independence Day with a special “All American Dessert” for snack. We each got a delicious piece of pound cake that we covered with red strawberries, blue blueberries, and white whipped cream… yum!

Oceanside loves swimming in the pool!

In Merrick/Bellmore, we also kept cool during this hot summer by hitting the pool at Newbridge Park. Everyone practiced their swimming skills and played with loads of water toys, but all agreed that the most fun was splashing our counselors!

Our littlest Merrick/Bellmore campers played in water sensory tables 

July 4^th was celebrated in Merrick by making red, white, and blue patriotic frames and flags. We also had a yummy American dessert of pie filled with strawberries, blueberries, and vanilla ice cream! We even rounded off our week with a great Fourth of July Dance Off contest!!

  

Long Beach at the HKC pool!

Perhaps the best part of the week for our Merrick 4’s was joining our Long Beach 4’s and heading out to the Henry Kaufmann Campgrounds to spend the day with our friends in Junior Camp. Everyone painted beautiful ceramic Starfish magnets, played with more bubbles then we’ve ever seen, rode on the train, and swam in a beautiful pool! The day finished off with a cool treat of ices and a fun trip home on the bus. We can’t wait to go back again and again this summer!

Merrick on the Train!

Also in Long Beach this week, a patriotic twist was placed on all of our camp activities. Our art period took us outside so we could get really messy making our own fireworks by flicking bright colored paint onto black paper (Jackson Pollack would be proud)! During out Little Chefs activity, we made edible sparklers by covering pretzel rods in vanilla frosting and rolling them in red, white and blue sprinkles. Who knew sparklers could be so yummy?!

One of our great Sparkler Paintings!

Our Long  Beach kids also took a trip to our garden to talk about fruits and vegetables. We noticed that the weather was really hot and decided our plants must be extra thirsty, so we made sure to give them lots of water to help them through this heat! Afterwards, we came indoors and put some of our favorite fruit – strawberries and blueberries – over vanilla ice cream for a 4^th of July dessert.

Planting in our Garden in Long Beach

Even music and Shabbat were patriotic this week in Long Beach. During music time we sang songs like “This Land is Your Land” and “I’m Proud to be an American.” Then, on Shabbat, we used red, white and blue food coloring in our cream cheese to spread on our challah!

As you can see, we’re off to a great start in Camp this summer. We can’t wait to see all of the fun things that are in store for us these next few weeks. You can keep track of all of the fun on both our Early Childhood and Friedberg JCC Family of Camps Facebook pages, and you can find hundreds of photos on our Bunk 1 website!

Happy Camping Everyone!