One of the leadership team members of my homeschool group had a great idea this summer - how about a week of homeschool camping?! FUN, I thought! So she planned out the week and we just returned from it yesterday. It was a LOVELY time.
Here are some of the details.
We chose the dates to coincide with the start of school here, so the campground would be emptier. We chose to camp Monday-Friday, so as to avoid weekend campground congestion. We chose a state park in our county, so it would be close enough to most people's homes that they could go home if they needed to - for sports practice, feeding animals, etc...
State parks in Michigan allow site-specific reservations, so we chose a section of the campground and each family made its own reservations in whatever site they wanted to have. We ended up with 4 families spending all 4 nights and 8-9 more families spending 2 or 3 nights.
We planned activities each day, such as face painting, rock painting, night hike, fishing, swimming, etc... We invited families from our group to come out and join us for the daytime activities if they couldn't camp with us. We had several more families join us for those activities. We tried very hard to have something each day, but not so many activities that we felt overscheduled.
We shared some meals - sometimes intentionally, and sometimes it just happened. We gathered around one or two main fire pits. The kids had a lot of freedom to run around because there were only a few other campers on our end of the campground.
I think everyone enjoyed it a lot and we plan to schedule another camping week next year!
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