Summer Day Camp

• Ages: 4 years old through 6th grade
• Six Weekly Sessions
• June 23 - August 1, 2008
• Monday - Friday; 9 a.m. - 3:15 p.m.
• Campers may attend from 1-6 sessions.
• Campers are grouped according to grade just completed.
• Hot lunch and two snacks served daily.

EXCITING New CIT Program - Click here for information

The summer of 2007 was definitely one to remember here at Solebury School Day Camp! There were lots of children having fun, record enrollments, and wonderful activities! All this was made possible through a combination of the real strengths of our program which are: its small size, the daily exposure and instruction the campers receive in a variety of activities, a warm, caring, and talented staff, the extra services we provide to help today's parents, the flexibility of our enrollment policy, and the special activities we run each week. Below is a more detailed look at each of these strengths.

Small Size

We have seven groups of campers divided by age with a target group of 15-20 campers per group. Determined to have exceptional supervision, we have created a camper to staff ratio of 4:1.What all this means is that your child will be in a place where he/she is known, understood, and safe.

Daily Exposure and Instruction in a Variety of Activities

Campers participate in seven different activities each day: swimming, arts and crafts, sports, flex, theater, science, and computers. Each one is a combination of instruction and play. All activities take place on campus.

The campers' favorite activity of course is swimming. After all, what symbolizes summer more than children in a pool? We instruct campers in everything from basic swimming to junior lifesaving to diving.

In arts and crafts we try to let the campers' imaginations run wild! They will paint, sculpt, draw, but mainly they will learn to have fun with art.

In sports, we believe children should be allowed to be children and that sports should be fun. Some instruction in soccer, tennis, and basketball will be combined with New Games and all the other games children love! Flex is short for flexible. It is tailored to the interests of the campers.

In theater, we try to let our outgoing campers shine while getting our quieter ones to blossom. Campers will do basic theater exercises as well as singing and dancing. Of course there is also preparation for the all camp show on the last day of camp. With Science, campers will learn to grow and care for their own plants and vegetables among other things in this completely hands-on activity.

Campers play computer games, but they also learn desktop publishing and video editing as they produce a weekly newsletter and the camp DVD to bring home to you!

A Warm, Caring, and Talented Staff

Scott Eckstein is the director of the camp. He is in his 12th summer as the camp director. His experience includes work at a variety of camps, both day and overnight, and he has been a full time teacher at Solebury School for 15 years. During the school year, he serves as Director of the Middle School, he teaches History and English and coaches softball in the spring. The entire staff is carefully chosen by Scott. He selects people who share his love of children, his determination to combine fun and learning, and his positive outlook. The activities' teachers are mainly faculty (often from Solebury). The experience and talents they bring to their job is what makes the camp function so well. The counselors are either college or high school students (many of them Solebury alumni or students, others of them alumni of the camp). Many of them baby-sit or do some other kind of work with children during the year, and they all do a truly wonderful job with the campers.

The extra services we provide to help today's parents

Because of the more complex nature of society, today's parents require more from camps today than they did in the past. With this in mind, we provide a variety of services which are intended to make our parents' summer as enjoyable and stress-free as their children's.

1. Food is included - we provide the campers with a hot and cold lunch (several choices) and two snacks every day.
2. Afternoon day-care - While this service costs extra, we do have day care available from 3-5:30pm.

The Flexibility of our Enrollment Policy

The summer is short and we recognize that people have many things they want to do, so we allow people to enroll for anywhere from one through six weeks of camp. We have a core group of campers (80 or so) who are here for all six weeks, and we have lots of families who include us as a portion of their summer plans.

The special activities we run each week

Because we have a fair amount of campers who do not come for the entire six weeks, we try to make each week special. We do this by offering a special day each week. Special events for this summer include, a carnival (games, food, prizes, a moonbounce, a clown), a Culture Week that gives campers an opportunity to do activities, eat foods and attend special events to learn about other countries, an overnight (activities, a cookout, a campfire with smores, movies), and trips to the Elmwood Park Zoo for Groups 1-3, the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ for Groups 4-5, and a night time Trenton Thunder game for Groups 6-7. For the seventh consecutive year, the campers will collect pledges and swim laps to raise money for the American Cancer Society. It is always wonderful to see the children so excited to help others and it was even more gratifying to see the pride they felt when they heard that we raised over $5,000! Our final special event was an all-camp theater production and art show on the last day of camp. It was a fantastic way to end the summer!

We have made great efforts to keep the cost of our camp reasonable, and to provide as much as we can for the money you pay. The registration fee includes all activities and trips, insurance, materials, lunch and snacks, and a t-shirt for each child.