Camp Exclamation Point, Inc.  (CAMP!)

Camp dates for Summer 2010 are August 15th - 21st!!!

At Camp Exclamation Point, we provide a traditional residential camp program with a broad range of choices to meet a variety of camper interests and skills. Our program empowers campers to make choices that directly affect their experience both at CAMP! and back home, while putting a particular emphasis on kindness and cooperation.  From the experience, campers become aware of an expanded set of possibilities and are better able to make good choices in their lives, and to have a positive impact back in their home communities.

Our campers live and work together in three different “families”: a tenting or “Pod” family, a dining room family, and an “Awesome” family (a group who share a common activity choice throughout the week). Pods are the tent groups, which are divided by similar school grade levels. Dining Room families are the table groups a camper sits with throughout the week. The table group stays the same all week so everyone has time to really learn about each other. Awesome groups are programs that happen each day, building on the previous day’s skills. Awesome programs are a range of activities that might include Tennis, Bread Making, Bottle Rockets, Archery, Canoeing, Jewels and Treasures, Fly Fishing or Fabric Design. 

In addition to Awesome options, campers also can pick from nine different “Choice” activities throughout the week.  Choices are shorter length activities such as sports, arts and crafts, drama, nature learning, dance or storytelling.  You may even see campers snorkeling or testing their engineering skills in an egg protector competition in a Choice activity.

Other areas for learning around camp include the Waterfront, Nature Center, Archery Range, and the Arts and Crafts Center. There is always a lot going on at Arts and Crafts such as charcoal drawing, watercolor painting, jewelry making, origami, mobiles and tin can lanterns.  There is plenty of time during the week for campers to finish multiple art projects and many of them enjoy tie-dying shirts at some point in their week as well.

Campers learn about the environment through programming at the Nature Center, where there are always interesting “critters” to observe.  There are scientific experiments through the Nature Center, such as rocket launching and the famous Egg Protector competition. Every day campers have a swim lesson and at some point during the week an introductory canoe lesson.  Free swim and the morning Polar Bear Swim are both popular activities on the Waterfront.  Some campers learn to swim for the first time while they are with us, while some swim across the lake during their week at camp!

Our final night of camp together is the annual Carnival, a hand-made country fair inspired and created by the campers and staff. Every year the theme changes, and is highly top-secret until the last possible moment.  This year the theme was “Honey, I Shrunk The Camp”, which came off without a hitch despite all day rain. Staff and campers alike played Life Sized games, munched on homemade pizza and competed to see who was the best at the Game of Life(Size)!

 

 

The Children’s Literacy Foundation partnered with us for the fifth time this year.  CLiF creats a lending library of more than 75 beautiful books for campers and staff to use during the week, and the foundation gave each camper several books of their choice to take home when camp ended.  CLiF also brought storytellers to camp for an evening campfire program, and helped bring reading and books to life for all our campers.  Storytelling Night is one of the high points of the week, and a well-loved tradition with both campers and staff of CAMP!