2021 Dance Themes!
One of the highlights of each session is our camp dance.
Dances feature favorite group dances, like Footloose and Tragedy. There’s also our photo booth for some pictures with friends, special snacks and drinks like the “Soy Rogers” and “Shirley Chipmunk,” as well as a wide selection of games for those campers that prefer playing games over dancing.
Each of our dances has a theme, and campers and staff are encouraged to dress up to match the theme. Some people bring costumes from home, while others improvise using their clothes or making something at Arts & Crafts. Whatever you choose to do, we know you’ll have a great time at our dances.
This year’s dance themes are:
June Shaver Specialty: Hollywood
Come as your favorite celebrity or dress to impress as one of your favorite movie characters for this fun SoCal themed party!
Session 1: Pirates
Shiver me timbers matey! Session 1 campers will be walking the plank to fun with their peg-legs, eye patches, and other pirate accessories.
Session 2: Groovy Hippies and Tie-Dye
Let’s have some far-out fun in Session 2, when we enjoy the dance with our best hippie costumes, or your tie-dyed favorites.
Session 3: Halloween
Having a hard time coming up with a costume for Session 3’s Halloween dance? Any costume will do as we celebrate the one night of the year when people love costumes as much as we do on dance night.
Session 4: Winter Wonderland
It’ll be the end of August, but we’re going to dress like a blizzard is on the way for our Winter Wonderland dance for Session 4.
Mini Camp and August Shaver Specialty: Candy Land
It’s a night for sweet treats as we end the summer with a dance celebrating candy, or the board game Candy Land!
Meet the 2021 Staff
We are so excited to be back at camp for another summer of fun, friends, and growth! Our staff is a big part of what helps make camp the special place that it is! Check out our Meet the Staff page to learn a little bit more about all of our counselors. Be sure to check back often as more staff members continue to join the team!
Be sure to also follow us on Instagram and Facebook for fun content! Every Monday is “Meet the Staff Monday” where we feature a few counselors and a little information about them. You can also find all of the past featured counselors on Instagram in the 2021 Staff highlight bubble in our profile.
Homesick and Happy Book Discussion Guide
Every child has to practice being independent and every parent has to practice letting his or her child be independent.
-Michael Thompson, Ph.D., Homesick & Happy: How Time Away from Parents Can Help a Child Grow
Most kids feel some apprehension before going on their first adventure away from home without parents. Many parents are also nervous about the separation from their child, especially if your camper is expressing anxiety about going away to camp.
The biggest source of parental concern is often how your child will handle the separation from you and if they will experience negative emotions, often referred to as “homesickness,” while at camp. While most kids do not feel extreme symptoms of homesickness at camp, many experience emotional challenges during their first (and subsequent) experiences at summer camp and other away-from-parent experiences. These feelings are normal and are something that we have helped many campers work through. Campers feel a great sense of accomplishment when they successfully overcome the challenge of homesickness, and we encourage you to view this experience through the lens of the long-term positive outcomes for your child.
One of our favorite resources for first-time camp parents is Michael Thompson, Ph.D.’s book Homesick and Happy. Parents will find this book helpful not only as you prepare to send your child to GAC this summer, but also as you think about and prepare your child for other future adventures away from you (like college!).
We know many of you are busy and won’t have time to read the whole book, so here are a few ways to get a quick overview:
• Read through our summary notes (sent with the book)
• Listen to Sunshine’s 2020 interview with Dr. Thompson on the GAC POGCAST.
• Listen to Sunshine’s 2017 interview with Thompson on the Sunshine Parenting podcast.
Book Highlights
The following selected passages will help you understand and communicate with your child about why this experience – even if they feel some (or a lot of) homesickness – is important for their development and growth into a thriving adolescent and adult.
Why parents need to “step aside”: p. 8-9 starting at “I believe…”
Eight things parents can’t give children: p.11
Why kids try more things with a camp counselor than they will with you: p. 19
Why kids need to master homesickness: p. 68-70
What parents can do to prevent or lessen homesickness: p. 89-92
Ten elements of a camp experience that create emotionally powerful experiences for children: p. 202-233
“Childsick” and Happy (info for parents missing their kids at camp): p. 238-251
Quotes from Homesick & Happy
Children want to be independent, and they realize that they cannot be truly independent until they beat homesickness, even when they have a painful case of it.
At sleepaway camp, campers send an average of zero texts per day. Into the space created flows a bunch of old-fashioned human behaviors: eye-to-eye contact, physical affection, spontaneous running and jumping, or simple wandering.
Sleepaway Camps Permitted to Open in CA!
We received good news this week. The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) has included “sleepaway camps” (resident camps like GAC) in businesses that are permitted to open (with COVID restrictions in place) this summer in counties that are in red, orange, or yellow tiers. The Director of CDPH also told a group of camp leaders that we can expect guidelines for resident camps by the end of this month.
Unless an unlikely shift occurs in COVID-19 transmission rates in Fresno County, Gold Arrow Camp will be permitted to operate this summer. However, until we receive the state guidelines for sleepaway camps, we still don’t know the specific procedures we will need to follow this summer, and we won’t have all those details until the guidelines are released.
We are encouraged by reports of increased vaccine availability and the dramatic drop in COVID-19 transmission rates across California. We are optimistic that these trends will continue and will lead to eased restrictions and a return to more normalcy for all. Our US summer camp staff have been included in the CDC tier with education and childcare workers, and most of our staff will be fully vaccinated before camp starts.
We appreciate your continued patience and flexibility. While we would love to provide you with all the details about modifications we will be required to make this summer, we cannot do so until we have the guidelines. Be assured that GAC will continue to meet the highest standards in the industry for our camper and staff members’ health and safety.
Head to our COVID-19 update for updated answers to FAQ families have about camp this summer.
March GATA Webinar
For this month’s Gold Arrow Teacher Academy (GATA) webinar on Wednesday, March 10 at 5pm PT/8pm ET, we are focusing on Growing Grit!
Grit, which is another word to describe the important character trait of “resilience,” is predictive of student well-being and success. In this webinar, we’ll cover ideas and strategies for helping students grow the grit muscles they need to thrive both in and out of school.
We know from decades of research that one of the most useful predictors of student success is how persistent they are when faced with a problem. This was catapulted into the public conversation by Angela Duckworth and her groundbreaking research on grit. Many of you have probably seen her TED talk in a professional development meeting! In this webinar, we’ll share what we’ve learned about teaching kids to develop grit at camp and share ideas for how you can help kids develop grit and how you can recognize kids for using grit in your classroom.
This webinar is free for all GATA members! If you are not yet a GATA member, you can join here or register just for the webinar here. Even if you’re not able to attend the live webinar on Wednesday, you’ll be able to access the recorded webinar and the accompanying resources.
JOIN NOW
Soy’s Well-Deserved Recognition
We are so lucky to have such amazing staff at Gold Arrow Camp, and every so often they are recognized for their incredible work outside of GAC. We want to take this opportunity to congratulate our very own Andy “Soy” Moeschberger on being awarded not one, not two, but three awards this year! He has worked so hard on many projects, especially legislative work to keep camps running and at the forefront of discussions amongst our political leaders. His work does not go unnoticed and we are so glad that it was noticed on a national level!
Grant Gerson Service Award – WAIC (Western Association of Independent Camps)
-The Grant Gerson WAIC Service Award pays tribute to those who make an extraordinary contribution to WAIC and to the advancement of the camp movement, and who have played an important role in the success of the association.
Southern California/Hawaii Service Award – ACA SoCal/Hawaii (American Camp Association)
-The Service Award is given as recognition to exceptional service to camping and the local area.
National Service Award – ACA (American Camp Association)
-This Service Award is designed to recognize continued and increasing service beyond the field/affiliate office level.
Strength Spotting: Becoming Your Best Self
We are excited to be able to offer some of the friendship and fun from camp in a new setting – Outschool! Gold Arrow Camp has recently become a partner organization with Outschool in order to teach our own courses on their platform. Outschool is a wonderful marketplace that offers live online classes for children. There is a variety of over 100,000 live online classes to choose from and we are thrilled to offer one of those (& hopefully many more soon)!
Our first course offering, Strength Spotting: Becoming Your Best Self, includes some of the most popular activities from our Junior Counselor workshop on character strengths and was also a well-received part of our online camp sessions last summer. Led by long-time year-round staffer and strengths guru Delta, the course helps kids identify their strengths and learn to lean into them as they navigate school, friendships, and life. It’s a one-hour course that promises to be exciting and social.
If you would like to sign up for our character strengths course, use this link to get a $20 credit toward your first Outschool enrollment. Once you sign up with Outschool, the credit will automatically be applied to your first course. Check out all of the great academic and non-academic courses offered on Outschool, and we’ll let you know when we have more of our courses available for you.
We hope to see you in one of our upcoming strengths courses!
New GAC Program – GACpacking!
Does your camper enjoy backpacking and hiking in nature? If so, this program is a wonderful way to do all of that and more. GACpacking provides an introduction to backpacking skills and life on the trail in a fun and compact one-week trip. Our GACpacking program is designed to serve as a bridge between the one-night backpacking experience offered as a regular part of our camp program and the Outdoor Leadership Course. On the trail, our hikers will have the opportunity to prepare their own meals, practice map and compass navigation, apply Leave No Trace principles and ethics, participate in sustainable backcountry living, and study wildlife biology. Each day there will also be time for reflection, dialogue, and discussion.
For more information about the GACpacking program, please visit https://goldarrowcamp.com/why-gac/gacpacking/ or email mail@goldarrowcamp.com with any questions.
Bring more connection, fun, & social emotional growth to your school this year with GATA!
PLEASE SHARE ABOUT GATA (Gold Arrow Teacher Academy) WITH THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR AT YOUR SCHOOL!
The webinars are great reminders of super valuable information that I’ve heard/read over the years. I love the chance to apply this information in a new teaching role. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow with like-minded people.
-Abbey, Teacher & GATA Member
This school year, GAC Directors are bringing the trainings we do with counselors each summer to educators all across the country through GATA (Gold Arrow Teacher Academy) and through custom professional development webinars for schools. Gold Arrow’s entire director team has children of their own (currently ranging in age from 4-26), and most of us were teachers before or while working at camp. Supporting children by providing teachers with training and support to create positive, connected classrooms is a natural use of our skills and experiences (and is super fun for us).
If you’re looking for a personalized, engaging professional development workshop for your school team, get in touch. We’d love to create an upbeat workshop geared specifically to the needs of the students and teachers at your school. Contact us and let us know what you’re interested in.
GATA resources have been developed based over years of training our counselors and have been implemented successfully by GATA members over first half of this school year to support students’ social and emotional well-being.
The topics we’re covering in GATA include:
Creating Connections
Celebrating Strengths
Cultivating Character
You – or your whole school – can join GATA to have immediate access to the engaging and easily implementable SEL activities that address the social and emotional well-being of students and teachers.
New GATA members have immediate access to our past resources, can join live (or access later) all of our upcoming webinars, and receive weekly PDFs with low or no-prep activities that work virtually or live.
Join GATA
GATA WEBINARS NOW AVAILABLE ON DEMAND FOR MEMBERS
(Non-members can purchase single webinar access.)
• Creating a Positive Classroom Culture
• Coaching Students to Better Collaboration & Communication
• Personal Growth & Connection Activities for Students
• Creating a Strengths-Focused Classroom
ACTIVITIES & RESOURCES NOW AVAILABLE IN THE MEMBER LIBRARY
Activities to Foster Online Classroom Connections (FREE sample PDF)
Questions for Classroom Connection
Creating a Positive Classroom Culture
Songs & Videos
Build Positivity & Optimism in Your Students
Guess Who
Jokes & Riddle
Teaching Kids Better Communication & Collaboration
Rules & Language of Collaboration
Create an Animal
Chill Music for Your Class
Coaching Students to Better Listening
SMART Goals
Autonomy & Problem Solving
Kindness Bingo
Filling Buckets
Personal Growth & Connection Activities
Friendship Bingo
Creating a Strengths-Focused Classroom
Inner Strengths
Encourage the educators at your school to join GATA for support, connection and fun SEL resources for teachers and students!
Questions? Get in touch with us to discuss your school’s SEL professional development needs!
One Word
For each of us, 2020 held a lot of different moments and emotions. We have now entered 2021, which is a great time to sit back and reflect on all that was last year. Audrey “Sunshine” Monke, GAC’s Chief Visionary Officer, shares with us an activity that your entire family can do together that encourages everyone to choose one word that will help to provide guidance, inspiration, and direction for the year.
On her website (Sunshine Parenting) and her podcast, Sunshine shares many resources to encourage family time and reflection, among many other useful topics for parents. To access those resources, sign up to receive her weekly emails or subscribe to her podcast.