Category: Counselors

Self-Care: Integrating Time for You in the Hectic Schedule of Daily Life

Posted on by Pam Cobb

You are catapulting around, working from your hectic home circus, syncing schedules between

hybrid education for your children, after school engagement, managing zoom meetings, connecting with your partner and family, caring for your parents, and hey, by the way, what’s for dinner?

As a reminder to myself and all of us, taking time for self-care during the pandemic is critical. One easy way to ground yourself is through stretching, yoga, movement with meditation. It all starts by rolling out the mat. Can you get up 20 minutes earlier? Can you escape for a lunch time stretch? 20-30 minutes is all you need for restorative healing and self-care.

At camp we are so lucky to have alumna Kara Benken Garrod lead both adults and campers in yoga practice. She teaches yoga in Ohio in the off season and generously helps guide us at camp.  

When we are not at camp, we love at home yoga with Adrienne Mishler.  Her brilliant and accessible at home yoga practice and her annual gift to all of us – 30 days of yoga in January. It is available to you any time of the day for free. She is so generous and beautiful to share her vision about yoga as a lifestyle with millions of viewers.

There are plenty of ways to get your children involved too. Ideas about yoga with children include stories and play about yoga, to classes  Here’s a fun way to introduce yoga, either a deck of yoga cards with some ideas about connecting breath and meditation or a poster of yoga moves for children to do on their own. Just have them roll out their mat and enjoy the fun!

Meanwhile, you can take a deep breath (breath in love, breath out fear) and grab your afternoon cup of coffee to get ready for the next 8 hours of catapulting around!

Love, Aionur

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching Children – Earning Your Own Dollar

Posted on by Pam Cobb

Earning your own dollar makes spending or saving it that much sweeter.

Whether you’ve had your own lemonade stand, done chores in your own home, helped mow a neighbor’s lawn, or shown up with a snow shovel after a storm to offer to remove snow for compensation, you know you learned about the value of money through the experience. For a child, you start to think “I am an entrepreneur!” Some children are naturally inclined to pursue how they can earn money and others may need a little nudge.

A classic read about developing a business thinking mind is Daryl Bernstein Better Than a Lemonade Stand or start young with the Bernstein Bears Trouble with Money

Talking about money is a great way to get started. The strategy of earning three dollars a week and putting one dollar in each jar, Save, Share, Spend develops empathy, the concept of saving for something special and the excitement of having some money to spend along the way.  The share jar is a project unto itself providing the opportunity for children to figure out where to share their money. Perhaps it’s your local church or synagogue or a family shelter or meals for seniors, or one of our favorites: World of Change, Maine Needs, Good Shepard Food Bank.

Opening a bank account, buying stocks, recording and balancing a check book bring up a lot of opportunities for learning and discovery. Forbes writes about five strategies for teaching children about money including talking about why you buy a generic food, or giving them 5 dollars to pick out the fruit at the grocery store:

Children as young as three can learn about money. Having a play store with a cash register at home is a great start.

As we all reel from the economic reprecussions of the pandemic, this topic may be harder to broach than others but starting simple and using the good intent of teachable moments will scare away the financial monsters we are all battling at this time.

Here’s to 2021 to good health and better lives for all.

Love, Aionur

Building life skills through adversity

Posted on by Alex

Building life skills is what we do at Camp Runoia. Little did we know that 2020 would test the skills that we had and encourage us to go far out of our comfort zone to develop new ones. We learned so much about ourselves, our campers and about the meaning and power of camp through being resilient  and adapting.

Looking back now we are grateful for the opportunity that a covid summer presented us to. We had to be flexible, grow, reconsider how we have always done things and be willing to modify, change and adapt in an instant. It turned out to be an amazing all be it exhausting summer and one that will certainly go down in the history books of Runoia.

     Takeaways from summer 2020:

  • We practiced doing hard things and did them well
  • We stopped sweating the small stuff
  • We learned new skills and revisited old ones that we hadn’t had time for
  • We reassessed what had value to us
  • We were more appreciative of the people and activities that we missed
  • It’s was OK to let some traditions go and know you can come back to them
  • We adapted and were flexible under ever changing circumstances
  • We used a growth mindset to challenge what we had done in the past and make it viable for the current situation
  • If you ask people will show up to help in ways you may not have thought of
  • You have to make the most of the moment in time that you have
  • Time with family is valuable but you need your friends too!
  • It may not be what you imagined but it can still be spectacular
  • Nature just keeps doing it’s thing. Sunset on the lake is beautiful.
  • Community comes in many forms, when we support each other we are all stronger
  • We maximized the opportunities that we did have rather than lamenting the ones that we didn’t
  • We had an amazing  summer on Great Pond that we never could have imagined   

As the year comes to a close we have deep gratitude for all that we have and look forward to 2021 with joy and eager anticipation. Happy New Year to our Runoia family, see you on Great Pond.

5 year Camp Runoia blankets

Posted on by Alex

 

Nights in Maine are very chilly, already there is a decent amount of snow on the ground and the dark settles in early. Evenings are perfect for a board game or cuddling up on the couch with a good book. Having the right blanket to snuggle up with is a crucial accessory. There are so many around to choose from,  a multitude of soft and fluffy ones, the scratchy woolen one to be avoided and the most popular recent addition a cozy sherpa fleece.

My favorite is my Runoia 5 year blanket, it’s a decent fleece, medium weight and a little old these days but it carries with it the warmth of summer. Amazing that a blanket can hold the memories of years on Great Pond.  The lifetime friendships, the hundreds of girls,  the joys and laughter all wrapped up in Runoia blue. 

Getting your 5 year blanket is a big deal for campers and staff, it represents your commitment to the place you have called your summer home, it’s an achievement, a milestone and a celebration. They are much anticipated and presented at cotillion on the last night of the season. You also get to be in the log photos for 5 years or more. You can’t purchase them and you only get one so need to take care of it reverently.

New 5 years in 2020
5 years or more in 2020

More than that achievement though it is the reminder of your summers you when you are not at camp. The blanket stays with you when you are at home in the winter or have long moved on from the shores of Great Pond. It elicits your Runoia a fond reminder of those long summer days. Maybe it gets pushed to the back of a closet for a while, or ends up in your dorm room at college. Perhaps it’s turns up in a carefully shipped package from your childhood home to you when you start your own life in a new place. Could be the dog steals it to curl up on or a younger sibling uses it for fort building. As time goes on it may get a little wash worn or frayed around the edges but it still has a warmth that only Runoia can provide. Alumnae still talk about their blankets and bring them back when they return as staff or attend a reunion.

We hope that there will be many more Runoia blankets to hand out. Celebrating 5 years at Runoia is so much more than receiving your camp blanket. We want all of our summer family to feel the warmth and love of camp the whole year through.

What the Teachers Say

Posted on by Pam Cobb

First, let us express our gratitude to teachers. We’ve always been fans but this fall, we have seen teachers turn into super heroes. They have multi-tasked, connected with their students, doubled their lesson planning and most of all put their own health at risk to help others.

This past summer many of our counselors who also are teachers learned a lot about navigating covid and creating systems to help keep themselves and others safe.   One moment that really strikes us is when we completed staff training in those complex and uncertain times and we prepared to welcome our campers the next day. We created our graduation for staff training as we often do with a clever connection to our theme “Camp over Corona, All the Things, We Can Do It – Our Vision is 20/20” And each administrative leader got up to share something with all the staff. A pep talk of sorts. Colleen “Cleen” shared this:

2020 has been quite the year

It’s felt lonely and we have known fear

But look round at this staff

Hear those distant laughs

How lucky we are to be here

 

 

Remember June and July? We had been in shut down mode and living in our homes and apartments for four months. It was a poem reflecting on the connection camp creates and what a milestone it was.

And, then in the spirit of Harmony Land (the meaning of Runoia is Harmony) she added this Haiku:

Harmony is here

This world seems new as our friends

Smiles still seen through masks

“Cleen” thanks for the poetry, the reflection, the inspiration. We send our energy to you as you finish your fall semester teaching in New York. You truly are a hero and have helped all of us be better teachers.

 

 

 

The Harmonyville Quilt Project

Posted on by Pam Cobb

We are commemorating our summer of Harmonyville Camp during the 2020 pandemic with an all camp quilt project. This fall I was catching up with my friend and camp director peer, MJ Parry. She is the executive director of Fleur de Lis. She gleaned some ideas from me about how we ran camp during Covid and I picked up this idea of a camp quilt project from her.  The greatest part of the camp industry aside from helping youth and adults stretch and grow and build lifelong skills, is the way camp directors share and pool knowledge.

My co-director, Alex Jackson, and I have talked with numerous camps who wanted to know what we did to run camp safely in 2020. We have been on a panel discussion with through Maine Summer Camps Education Committee to help other directors see a path forward in 2021.  I have been interviewed for a blog with CampMinder, a national online camp information tool. One of our doctors is being interviewed for the American Camp Association’s “Camping” magazine about how we ran camp. We share.

I shared the quilt idea with Alex and she latched onto it with excitement. I asked Alex if she would write a limerick to showcase the quilt project. She is so clever!

The Great Harmonyville Camp Quilt

Harmonyville camp was a blast

Great memories that will certainly last

“Masks up and Let’s Go!”

We soon got in the flow

This quilt will commemorate the past

We came up with the instructions people would need to make their square.  Alex mailed the quilt squares to all the Harmonyville campers and staff so they can contribute their square to the quilt project with the limerick and instructions and some fun stickers on each envelope. We are seeking quilters to help compile the project this winter. The finished quilt(s) will hang in the Dining Hall and Den to remind people that Runoia girls have grit, determination, courage, love and kindness.

Love,

Aionur

P.S. Are you one of the CRH participants who enjoyed camp this past summer? Do you have a square of fabric sitting on your desk or counter top?  Sketch out your design of what the summer meant to you and get it back in the mail to camp soon!, A deadline of December 15 is set for your square to be included so our quilters can quilt this winter. Let’s go #runoiagals!

 

 

The WISCO Girls Go to Maine – guest blog

Posted on by Alex

We were so lucky to have had the WoW (Women of Wisconsin) team at Camp Runoia this summer. Their dedication to overnight summer camp, creating amazing experiences for campers plus a desire to see the great State of Maine generated an epic road trip and a summer for the memory books.

In their own words….

It’s 4 in the morning, still dark, a little damp out, and four people with their summer’s worth of gear are looking at a small Nissan Versa with a determined squint. Collectively, we all understand “it will fit” and spoiler alert: with some very creative packing, it did. A forgotten wallet and an accidental detour later, the WISCO girls were on the road. We had compiled a 12 hour playlist to make the drive more manageable and at some points we took breaks to read listicles. Finally, we reached our layover in New York where racoons stole some baked goods. Again, we piled into the car and were about to finally make it: Maine couldn’t come soon enough.

The WISCO Girls arrived at Camp Runoia greeted by what we assumed were smiling faces, but everyone was masked, so who really knows? We comically unpacked our clown car: more and more things and people seemed to keep coming out. And so it started. Camp Runoia COVID Camp. We had arrived late, so we met only a few people and were herded into Sixth Shack. The next morning, we grabbed our warm beverages and hit the ground running.

Those two weeks of training were a whirlwind. Phrases like, “wash in, wash out” and “masks up, let’s go” continue to run through our brains to this day. Some topics were familiar, standard camp fare we’d been trained on for years, but some new and mysterious things such as The Pix, Pigtail Fridays, and The Soapies were demystified. We met all our coworkers and eventually were separated into our shacks- Emily and Mary stayed in 6th, Kerry went to 5th and Victoria to 7th. 

Our first pigtail Friday!

Once we had been sufficiently trained and quarantined, it was finally time for campers. We could fill a book with all of the wonderful adventures and experiences we had with our Runoia gals this summer, but we only have so much space, so we’ll provide you with some highlights: 

-Being serenaded by 6th shack’s original song “Green Bean Salad”

-2nd Shack’s Wolf Biology Lesson 

-Spooky loon calls

-Playing mermaids in Great Pond

-Attempting to learn Tik Tok dances the kids taught us

-The Talent Show

-A Floating Breakfast

-The Wicked Witch of the East, Bro

COVID protocols which seemed overwhelming at first quickly became second nature. Before we knew it, we were saying goodbye to our campers and packing the car to head home.

In the end, this crazy-covid-clorox camp (as Alex put it in one of her emails to us) ended up being just what we needed during the uncertainty of COVID. While anyone who has attended or worked at any camp knows that being at camp often leads to a summer of chaos, that chaos is predictable, familiar and sometimes even intentional. During a time where the world was (is) so rapidly changing outside of anyone’s control, it was that special predictable type of camp chaos that drew us to Runoia. All of us WISCO gals are scattered around the country now and it’s anyone’s best guess as to where we’ll find ourselves next summer, but we feel very lucky to have gotten the opportunity to spend Summer 2020 on Great Pond with campers and staff alike. 

With Love, 

The WISCO Girls 

Emily, Kerry, Mary, and Victoria 

 

Living Leadership – a unique CIT summer

Posted on by Alex

Providing opportunity for leadership and growth in personal development is a key component of all of Camp Runoia’s programming. Multi age classes and self directed goals allow campers to navigate their own skill development and girls of all ages are given a chance to have their voices heard. Older campers often take on the role of friend and mentor to younger girls and share their skills and love of camp activities with those that are in need of help. Skippers in sailboats, captains of teams, helpers at the barn and other opportunities to be up front all allow campers to gain leadership skills while working on their own goals.

The Counselor in Training program (CIT) is often the capstone of camper years and allows for a very intentional, full summer experience with a leadership focus. In typical summers CIT’s live as a group with their CIT Director and work together in and around camp to build skills. 2020 proved to be a whole lot different. Four amazing young women who were up for a new and evolving challenge joined Harmonyville for a different kind of CIT program. 

 

With the creation of ‘households’ and restricted interactions of groups it meant that in order for the CIT’s to get the best experience of actually working with campers they spent much of their summer living in cabins.  The CIT’s also joined us for staff training and were able to live together during that time and get some very intensive skill coaching before their move to live with campers. It was a very different approach yet worked incredibly well under the unusual circumstances. This group of young women were able to navigate not only the transition from being campers to taking on a more comprehensive leadership role but also having to be separated from their peers and fellow CIT’s. They truly were living their leadership development as they actively engaged with all aspects of daily life in camp.

This fabulous four accomplished so much over their unique CIT summer. Even with a reduced amount of time at camp and additional responsibilities they passed archery instructor training, managed to navigate a socially distanced lifeguard class, made connections with their campers, took classes in child development, homesickness and a multitude of other camp related situations and did it all while maintaining and building their personal friendships. Their growth was amazing and they worked through the hard parts and saw the benefits of being at camp even when it wasn’t what they had originally imagined. They built life skills that will serve them well as they head out into their junior years and begin to navigate what life after high school may look like.

 

We hope that this tenacious group will be back for more Runoia summers. Our counselor staff group will benefit from their skills, capable competence and true Runoia spirit.

Hope for next summer

Posted on by Alex

As we navigate life living with covid 19 and create our own ‘new normal’ managing all of the procedures and public safety protocols, even regular everyday life can get a little overwhelming. It is sometimes hard to see a way forward without taking two steps backward.  We are all living in an unknown time with so many questions about what the immediate and long term future may look like. Information still seems to change on an almost daily basis, schedules are always flexible as schools shift back and forth between in person, virtual and hybrid learning models. Talk of the looming holiday season and how that may look for families is becoming a more current conversation. Making plans for any travel or vacation out of state seems like an impossible feat. We are only able to navigate the present which for a culture that loves a planner and to have life scheduled out is proving very challenging for many.

So how on earth are we ready to open enrollment for camp in the summer of 2021?

The path to the lake is always there.

How do we make decisions when we don’t know what the future may look like? Perhaps it is time to just jump in with hope? Get the puppy, eat the cake and be sure to sign up for camp! We know from our experiences of this past summer that we can create a safe and engaging space for our girls to have an intentional summer experience.

Camp Director colleagues who were unable to open camp this past summer have been keen to chat with us about how our summer went.  They don’t really have specific questions but more are seeking hope for how they can operate in 2021. As everyone has different sites, programs and clientele there is definitely no magic ‘this will work for you’ solution. How we operated Runoia in 2020 may also look slightly different than how we do it in 2021 as we will be another year down the covid road. We talk often about attitude and mindset. Knowing that opening camp and running safe programs has been done encourages others that it can be done at their camp too. Camp Directors are a positive, resilient, creative crowd and are keen to dig into how they can operate safely in 2021. Sharing stories and telling our tale of summer 2020 helps the profession as a whole. The collective hope is that the most amount of campers can safely get to their camps next summer.

Hopefully our Harmonyville campers are telling their stories too! Other kids need to be hearing from their peers that going to camp next summer will be safe and fun. Peer sharing has so much value in generating a narrative that has substance.

We take pride in the fact that 2021 is Camp Runoia’s 115th continuous season of operation. We will definitely be ready for yet another amazing summer on Great Pond.

Home School, Remote or Hybrid Learning – Runoia Can Add to Your Daily Schedule

Posted on by Pam Cobb

Trending across US education are hybrids of remote learning, home schooling and some in-person connection at schools or pop up play spaces. Let the experiential education of camp layer into your school year with these great tutorial videos from counselors. Last spring Camp Runoia staff put together about 20 videos of easy to do at home projects including science, crafts, exercise and more. You can find them all on the official Runoia YouTube channel.

Build in Break Times During Your School Day

Building exercise breaks into the school day helps increase attention and creates more brain space for learning! Fit in a break during the day by having Kara teach your children a yoga class.

Cooking is also a fun break and involves, following a recipe, measuring, learning about stove safety and more. Check out Jen and Natalie’s fun baking moments on the Runoia Youtube channel.

Craft Ideas – Stimulating Creativity

Crafts involve planning, organization and coordination – great skills. Get your Runoia “building lifelong skills” action happening by checking out our craft ideas on Youtube. Simple crafts from things around the house – join Callie to see what you can do with TP tubes or get more involved (pre-order supplies) macramé with “K” or nature imprints or marbled paper with MacKenzie. Abbie shows how to make a pipe cleaner flower, too!

Science Applied to Camp and Life Experience

Baking comes up again in the science category as does CJ’s 24 hour Egg Osmosis experiment. And, check out Ruby’s Best Paper Airplane Ever –add in some physics lessons about aero-dynamics and physics with this Scientific American article and learn how Bernoulli’s principals also apply to how a sail boat’s sails involves lift and how it harnesses the wind to move a boat forward.

Challenge your daughter to sing (and or learn and sing) Out on the Blue Waves – one of our favorite sailing songs at camp.

Love,

Aionur