P: Play!
PLAY! If you spend a little time with us, you’ll quickly find that Champ Camp is passionate about play. Not in the hokey ‘we’re so laid back and fun so sign up now sense,’ but from the the ‘this stuff is golden, and more of it needs to be shared with your kids ASAP’ perspective. In fact, the benefits of play are so paramount that, if we weren't passionate about it, I would personally advise you to take your business elsewhere. Play is the bedrock of our organization, and the guiding light for all that we do.
Infusing our kids with many of the big picture ideas that we all hope to acquire on our journey through life, play is the greatest form of informal education. Tinkering with seemingly unlike objects to design new things introduces us to problem solving, out-of-the-box thinking, and the value of patience. Play is restorative, affording our brains the opportunity to recharge from the more structured parts of our lives. Dreaming up a world of robots and castles amidst a pile of Big Blue Blocks in the sand sparks imagination and fires up creativity. Perhaps more importantly, hearing another’s completely different ideas about what they think is possible to create or invent opens the doors to collaboration, empathy, and teamwork. Any way you spin it, play teaches our kids heavy hitting life lessons while simultaneously providing their minds with meaningful engagement.
In a world of constant stimulation, many of us have developed the tendency to look outwards for fulfillment and entertainment, passively waiting for those things to arrive by way of an app, text, or news update. While it might feel exciting for a second, any perceived benefit of this sort is fleeting. Play, on the other hand, encourages contented absorption into whatever is available at a given time and space. Purely, play is full engagement with the moment, without comparison to how things ought to be, or the worry of needing to reach a destination. Perhaps not so coincidentally, those are precisely the things that most of us could use more of in our day-to-day...
Let the games begin!
-Trevor
