RoadTrip USA!

Today was day three of RoadTrip USA! and I have to say that other than the heat, this has been the best week and best camp I think I have ever done!  We are having an absolute blast so I just had to share this day with you!

Today was "New Orleans" day so I set up the day to be carnival style.  Here's how we went through the day...We started out singing our theme song, a fun song my friend, Joy put together to the tune of "Yankee Doodle", then we went inside and made our masks.

I bought inexpensive plastic masks and a small bag of feathers.  Add some Sharpies and some tacky gems I had in my craft room and they went to town!

They were very creative and it was a fun activity to do together.







Here's the group with 2 of my helpers standing on either side!











From there, we listened to the story of Duke Ellington.

This is my friend and  very creative right arm, Becky.  She has been reading one of these books each day to the kids.  She is an excellent reader and although the books are exceptional good, her reading skills have kept them captivated! 






From there, we went outside and tried (emphasis on "tried"!) to learn to swing dance!

This was the hardest of all the movements we have worked on this week.  Unfortunately the heat was also working against us, but  the kids really tried hard and I was proud of all of them!







Then started the carnival!  The kids were each given 10 tickets and had 6 areas of music themed adventures to try.  They paid 1 ticket to do the event.  If they won, they received anywhere from 2-4 tickets back and were able to use them at the end to buy popsicles, bead strands or something from the prize box.  Here's a look at the areas we used...

A shooting gallery!  Those are soda cans marked with the letters of the alphabet.  They were shown a note on the magnetic staff and had to "shoot" the right can with a water gun, trying to knock it over!  They did a few of these in order to win extra tickets!

This is a toss game.  The balls are all labeled with a letter from A-G.  They each had 15 tries to get all 7 letters of the musical alphabet in one of the 2 hula hoops.  They loved this game!

This area was all about terminology.  They had to look at cards with terminology symbols on them.  If they guessed 5 correctly, they got to throw a wet sponge at one of the leaders.  This was one of my great teen helpers!  Thanks, Mackenzie!!








Every carnival needs a duck pond and ours was no expection...I called it "Notable Floatables"!  Each floating critter had a letter name on the bottom.  Once they picked up a critter in the pond, they had to place the correct note on the magnetic staff board.  We also did a few fun games at this area using intervals.





We had two areas that worked on rhythm.  One was the bean bag toss aka "Red Beans and Rice" toss game and...

a ring toss game!  In both the bean bag toss boards and this one, they had to try and build measures of beats!

The kids spent about an hour and a half on the carnival and then we got together again and did a fun activity to drill terminology using the parachute!

Overall it was a fabulous day!  Several kids told me it was an "awesome" day!  I was thrilled because they really seem to be retaining all the information we've been working on with them!

Tomorrow we travel to New York City!