Give day camp a campy feel

[Shrek]

4 years ago I left my residential camp background to try my hand in living in the city and started to work in day camps. I have been working ever since to try to capture some of that camp feel in my day camps with some success. Has anyone else found sucessful ways to give a day camp on a sports field in the city a camp feel?

[triplethreat]

This is a goal of mine as well. I want my camp to feel the way a sleep-away camp does, even though the kids go home at night.

My camp is new, so I am trying to slowly implement different techniques to achieve that sleep-away feel. To start with, I am concentrating on building the personal connections within each cabin group, between campers and between campers and counselors. Most of our campers don't know each other outside of camp so we will be spending some time during pre-camp working on different ways to facilitate new friendships and building "shared experiences".

I'd love to hear some other perspectives on this as well.

[Shrek]

I have also been working on the small group connections. A few of the things that I have done that seem to work is to make group sizes smaller (or so they think). Instead of having 20 kids with 2 counselors, I now have 10 kids to 1 counselor and they they have a "buddy" group that travels with them. I have also tried to give every group thier own space (a picnic table) that is thiers to decorate and keep clean. I have added a lot to assemblies so they feel more like a dinning hall and have tried to decorate our pavillion with the kids projects so if feels more like a dinning hall. Each week the kids creat their group name, rules, and design thier own group flag which they all sign (a full value contact).

I think another thing I have tried to do is giove teh counselors more time to get creative with thier groups. If thier kids want to doa skit then they have teh ability to work that time to prepair into their day schedule. I knwo so keep camp so tight that there is nto this flexability.

I too would love to hear what others are doing to improve this.

[Flower]

That's a goal of the camp I'll be working at this summer. This is my first summer there, so I'll be able to share more about what happens to try to get that aim after the summer. I do know that each group has a group leader and counselors who travel with that specific group. The counselor to camper ratio is pretty low for a day camp especially with the younger kids.
Each group has a 'bunk' (a classroom at the school the camp is held at) that is their base area.
The camp has a long session length with all campers being required to attend the first four weeks of camp. There are two more two week sessions afterwards and campers can choose to also come to one or both of them. This should lead to a strong community feeling, I think.
The camp also has special events each week, including a color war called "Olympics" at the end of the summer.