When Lil’ Miss Louboutin started Kinder, one of the most daunting tasks was figuring out camps. This was new territory for me because her preschool only ever closed for major holidays, and all we had to do was pay a small extra fee on top of our regular tuition to cover the extra fun summer activities they built into their program. In short, every season was business as usual, and I did not have to think about alternate care for things like summer break. After all, it’s not like working parents get a break just when the kids do.

Once we got the school year calendar, I discovered just how many days off her public school had. On top of the usual Thanksgiving break, winter break, spring break, and summer break… there were also staff development days, parent conference days, and “student/teacher holidays”. These were all alternate phrases for “the school is closed so figure something else out for your kid”. Beyond that, there is also a slew of minimum days.

Our elementary school has an on-site aftercare program that covers all the breaks, so that has always been one option. But we also considered other options that suited her interests, such as gymnastics camp, art camp, science camp, and camps offered through our city such as culinary camp, sports camps, chess camp, etc.

Winter and Spring camps are relatively easy to coordinate since they are only one to two weeks long. It was the ten weeks of summer that really required some planning. Although I could’ve made it easy by enrolling her in her aftercare program all summer long, I wanted to give her some variety.  We ended up with:

  • 3 weeks of STEAM camp
  • 3 weeks of art camp
  • 3 weeks at her school’s onsite aftercare program, which included field trips such as beach days, water parks, and bowling.
  • 1 week of gymnastics camp

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Summer camp registration usually opens up in March around here, so in order to secure a spot… you have to pay when you register. Camps I’ve seen around here run anywhere from $160 to $450 a week, and pricing also depends on if you enroll them for half days or full days. This year, both kids will be going to summer camp together, and we’ve enrolled them in:

  • 3 weeks of Mandarin immersion camp – it sounds like a lot of fun because they have theme weeks such as slime week, culinary week, space week, and field trips, but everything will be conducted in mandarin.
  • 3 weeks of a “Read, write, publish” camp for Lil’ Miss // 3 weeks of “Jumpstarting Kinder” for Mister Chucks.  The classes are at the same location at the same times, which makes it convenient for us.
  • 2 weeks at her school’s onsite aftercare program, which she had an absolute blast in last year.
  • 2 weeks at home – to give them a chance to do nothing the first and last week’s of summer.

Here is a colorful Google spreadsheet my friend and I used to coordinate camp schedules when our kids were in Kindergarten:

camps

Doesn’t this look like all kinds of chaos??  Haha, let me decode it:

  • Each row of the colors represents a specific camp (i.e. Green is gymnastics)
  • Some camps are only offered certain weeks, so there are white spaces (i.e. Korean camp is only offered Weeks 5-8, so only those weeks got color-coded).
  • On the bottom, we “mapped” out our options.  As you can see, I went with Option 1, and my friend went with her Option 2.   By matching up the colors in the option we chose, we were able to tell which weeks of camp our daughters would be together.  That summer, those were weeks 1, 8, and 10.

This also helped me easily price out the cost of summer between my options 1, 2, and 3. I was able to make an informed decision based on a myriad of factors – my daughter’s interest in the camp, the cost, and the convenience.  Ah, the things we have to think about now as parents to elementary school-aged children.

Have you started planning your summer yet?  What are your plans?