Outdoor education summer camps, like Catalina Sea Camp, provide more benefits for children than just being active outdoors and making new friends. They provide a direct, active, and engaging learning experience that takes place in nature and involves kids participating in activities that include a certain amount of risk and challenge that develops interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships, and promotes personal growth while enhancing physical skills.
These outdoor education experiences can provide long-term benefits for your child that last a lifetime, and set them up for success. Let’s take a look at a few of the ways.
Improves Health
Spoiler alert: outdoor adventure education makes your kids healthier and more active. Shocking, we know. Who would’ve thought fresh air and activity would make you healthier?
Being active outside increases children’s physical and social health, while also helping them form healthier habits that continue long after they’ve left summer camp. So they’ll come home wanting to spend less time inside on a screen, and more time outside.
Improves School Performance
Studies have shown that outdoor adventure education utilizes a greater range of the child’s intelligence, leading to overall enhanced achievement, including better test scores, a better attitude towards school, and a better attendance record. Performing well in school will lead to better opportunities for them in their future professional and personal lives.
Supports Child Development
Outdoor adventure education supports emotional, physical, and intellectual growth in children, instilling in them a “can-do” attitude that they can apply to all aspects of their lives. They develop a better sense of self, which allows them to better manage fear, stress and anxiety, as well as instilling in them a sense of determination and a desire to succeed. Problems and roadblocks that cause others to give up, your kids will view as challenges to be overcome.
Helps Develop a Sense of Place and Civic Attitude
Kids who take part in an outdoor education program learn to respect, and develop a relationship with, the environment, as well as the communities that they live in. They begin to see themselves in a global context and understand the importance of preserving nature and their community. These experiences help shape kids into the civic leaders of tomorrow, taking the conservation of our world into their own hands.
Makes Learning Fun
Outdoor adventure education makes learning fun for kids. After 9 months stuck in a classroom, sitting at a desk, snorkeling in Catalina Island’s Toyon Bay to study the area’s marine biology is a nice change of pace that puts the fun back in learning.
Active learning is a more engaging way for kids to learn, promoting deep learning rather than surface learning, and building thinking skills such as application of knowledge, analysis, and synthesis.
Do you want your child’s summer to be spent building life skills that will set them up for long-term success? Then contact our team today!
Catalina Sea Camp welcomes kids ages 8-17 interested in marine biology and ocean adventure for a summer full of fun and exploration. During our one and three-week sessions, campers are encouraged to enjoy learning about marine biology on a private beach at Toyon Bay and Fox Landing on Catalina Island.
