By Carmine Ciccone, Senior Director of Downtown Camps
What's your child doing this summer? Here are five positive changes kids experience after just a week at a YMCA outdoor camp.
1. Health benefits
At outdoor camp, Vitamin D comes free of charge! Along with this essential part of bone-strengthening healthy development, kids work up a sweat playing and exploring outdoors. Sweating is a natural process that cleanses the body of toxins, and your child will be healthier and more energetic.
2. Endless opportunities to get fit
The changing terrain of the outdoor environment challenges and conditions your child's calf, quad and abdominal muscles even when simply walking. In the great outdoors, everything is just that — great! Soccer fields are bigger, races are longer and bases are farther, training a child's body to become fitter and stronger.
3. Kids get a chance to be kids!
Children spend 10 months a year at a stationary desk with little time to just have fun. Outdoor campers spend all day, every day in an open and fresh atmosphere that boosts imagination. Kids can make a fort from fallen branches or engineer goalposts by balancing the team's backpacks. At outdoor camp your child will discover their creativity!
4. A new appreciation for nature
Appreciation is the first step to sustainability, and campers are taught to not only clean up because they have to, but because the world they live in depends on it. Staff encourages their campers to go beyond and leave their camps cleaner than the day they arrived, transforming your child into an appreciative outdoor adventurer.
5. New friends and experiences
At outdoor camp, kids and counsellors work together in the varying weather conditions, forging a connection and mutual understanding that creates a strong feeling of community. Though the great outdoors is vast, it has a strange way of bringing us together and gives your child the opportunity to make new friends and learn new things.
Give your child the experience of a lifetime at one of our outdoor YMCA day camps:
Pickering Petticoat Creek YMCA Day Camp
Richmond Hill Lake St. George YMCA Day Camp
