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The work to create a kinder world never ends. There is no limit on the amount of goodness we can put into the world, but we need your help! We invite you to join the annual Random Acts of Kindness Day (RAK DAY) celebration on Friday, February 17, 2023 and help #MakeKindnesstheNorm. Random Acts of Kindness Day is Friday, February 17, 2023! Random Acts of Kindness Week is February 12-18, 2023! Click here for more ways to get inspired and for more information about the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation!

We invite all of our friends and family to join Gold Arrow Camp in participating in the National Day of Unplugging from sundown on March 3 to sundown on March 4. This time of being unplugged is a movement to encourage people to get a "24-hour respite from technology." If you have experienced a summer at GAC then you know the importance of unplugging and connecting face-to-face, which is why we don't allow cell phones at camp. The National Day of Unplugging encourages people to use 24 hours free from technology to connect with "ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities." Wow. That sounds an awful lot like camp! We love the idea of unplugging (just for a little bit) at home so that we can reforge the kind of connections there that we forge at camp, where we're totally free from the burden of technology. You can join us in celebrating by pledging to #unplug on social media, sharing this news story, or even planning an unplugged event with your family! You could have an old-fashioned dinner party, spend that Saturday working on puzzles or playing board games. If you need more ideas, check out the NDU 2023 Ideas List and sign up to become a FREE member! If you have plans to unplug, please tag us in those on your social media. We'd love to share your plans (and what you did, after the fact, of course) on our social media!

https://youtu.be/2eDNVD26ZNw This year's summer theme, chosen to help guide campers to be trustworthy and dependable friends, cabin mates, and family members, is "Count on Me." Our first summer theme was in 2012 when we chose the theme of gratitude. We followed that theme with kindness (Cool 2B Kind), relationship building (Creating Connections), helpfulness (Give a Hand), grit (Growing Grit), positivity (The Energy Bus), a focus on friendship (Find-a-Friend), building up others (Filling Buckets), being our best selves (Be You ), appreciating our community (Better Together), and Choosing Kindness (2022). An important character trait of a good friend is being reliable, dependable, and trustworthy. We know that it's important that our campers develop these traits. This year at Gold Arrow Camp, we will be learning how to be people our friends can count on. We're thrilled to make our GAC community stronger by helping campers understand the importance of being a person their cabin mates, friends, and family can count on. There are many opportunities at camp to be dependable and reliable. "Counting on Me" means using our words and actions to show others they can count on us:

• Count on me to be a trustworthy friend
• Count on me to be a dependable cabin mate
• Count on me to be a responsible community member
• Count on me to challenge myself to grow at camp
• Count on me to show gratitude for others
• Count on ... Read more
  Tags: benefits of camp, camp, campers, count on me, GAC, gold arrow camp, summer camp, summer theme
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In all probability, the educationist of the year 2000 AD will look back upon us and wonder why we, the school people of 1938, failed to include the camp as an integral unit of our educational system. – The Kappan Magazine, the official magazine of Phi Delta Kappa – 1938 If you ever have the opportunity to visit us at camp, you’ll have the opportunity to sing the GAC Song. While many people love the “wadda-ing” that takes place in the chorus, my favorite part comes in the final verse. We sing, “I sure did learn much more here than I ever did at school.” My love of this line comes from my teaching before I came to work for Gold Arrow full time; I was a high school social science teacher for 14 years. It may seem odd that a teacher would love a line about learning more at camp than we did at school. But I do because camp and school operate symbiotically. While those of us in camping and education have known this anecdotally for many years, there is an increasing body of evidence that supports that belief with data. Some of that research has been supported by the American Camp Association, and I was privileged to hear one of the leaders in the field, Lance W. Ozier Ed.D. speak on this at a recent conference. He has written on the history of camps and schools (you can read it Read more