YMCA Camp Starfish

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Our Story

Camp Starfish is a six week program that operates in the summer months from 8:30am-5:30pm and primarily serves children from lower-income families. We offer financial aid for campers entering Kindergarten-5th grade and offer a leadership experience at a reduced rate or no cost to youth entering 9th-11th grade. Our philosophy at Camp Starfish is: “for campers to embrace their own creative spirit, try and learn new things, build new friendships, learn to work collaboratively in a community of peers representing diverse cultures and life experiences, and most importantly for each camper to have a healthy and fun filled summer”. The unique aspect of the Starfish Program is our untraditional summer camp model. Camp Starfish was created nine summers ago with a goal of combating negative youth health trends (i.e obesity, malnutrition, sedentary behavior), unintentional childhood drownings, and summer learning loss. Today, our camp program has grown to include a diverse offering of both academic and enrichment programs such as daily reading and writing, daily swim lessons, movement activities, music, art, drama, service learning, gardening, engineering, and cooking. Through interactive, movement and project based activities, our campers develop the problem-solving and critical thinking skills necessary to becoming lifelong movers and learners. We pride ourselves on social emotional learning which a growing body of evidence suggests produce positive outcomes for school children, including improved behavior, attitudes, and academic performance. Every morning and afternoon our campers gather for either a whole camp assembly or an opening or closing circle where each camper greets each other and their counselor, discuss the day, accomplishments of campers or staff made at home or camp, and a brief interactive activity. Through our partnership with the NYS Department of Education and the Family of Woodstock, our campers receive two healthy snacks and a hot lunch everyday. Every lunch and snack is served family style within each of our homerooms where campers, counselors, staff, and volunteers have a chance to talk and learn more about one another. Through tracking we are happy to report that there were a number of great improvements each summer in our children's physical health, reading and writing, social emotional well-being and swim levels. After several years of fine tuning our programming we are proud to offer a balanced approach to keeping our children academically and socially stimulated through the summer with fun interactive project based activities. By keeping our children academically and socially engaged through the summer months will reap tremendous benefits for each of them in short and through their lives beyond camp academically, mentally, physically and socially. With so many scholars, educators and youth professionals across America joining the movement in rethinking how we utilize the summer months, let us be proud that with the support of so many from around our community that we are able to offer a program that has the whole child in mind.