Family Summer Camp: Disney Theme

Have you ever wanted to plan a camp for your kids at home (if you are a teacher, you could also use this in your classroom)? If yes, keep reading!!

This summer, I am planning to create themed weeks to incorporate homeschool lessons, while also having fun. For the first week, we have a Disney theme!!

Revealing the Theme

To prepare for the reveal, my husband and I made a few Mickey streamers and hung them on the windows and our island. I also made some Mickey head cutouts (numbered 1-9 to practice numbers) and hid them...these were our "hidden Mickeys." Breakfast was ready with Mickey pancakes. Sometime, I want to splurge on a Mickey waffle maker, but for now, we are making Mickey pancakes.

The theme was a success! The kids immediately spotted a few hidden Mickeys and were thrilled to search for them. This became an activity we repeated several times each day during the week, sometimes with the kids hiding them and Mom searching.

Games

• Hidden Mickeys (previously mentioned)

• Mickey in Color: I created and printed Mickey heads in different colors. These were used to help my preschooler learn his colors. As he is still getting familiar with them, we focused on two colors at a time and gave him objects to match with the corresponding Mickey head color. In the future, I plan to print two sets of Mickey heads to create a Memory game.

• Bingo: I created blank bingo boards and gathered a collection of pictures featuring 25 Disney World snacks. To assemble the bingo board, each child cuts out the snack images and places one in each space on the board. (This provided good practice with scissors and fine-motor skills for gluing.) To play, cut out an additional set of snack cards and select them randomly one at a time. As each snack is chosen, players will mark it on their boards (we used math linking cubes as markers). The first player to get 5 in a row wins!

• Board Games: Here are some board games we own: Family Feud Disney Edition, Hedbanz Disney Princess and Hedbanz Frozen, Hedbanz Disney, Frozen puzzle, Guess in 10 Disney, Uno Disney Princess, Guess Who? Disney Princess

Crafts

• Arm bands: We created paper magic bands to "scan" each day. To scan in, we simply held our bands up to a paper featuring a Mickey head inside a circle, resembling the electronic scanner at the park entrances.

• Lanyard and pins:

  • Lanyard: I crafted the lanyards using felt, scissors, and a glue gun. Each child chose their preferred felt color. I cut three strips of felt (approximately 1" x the long side). Using a glue gun, I connected the three sections by placing the ends of the middle piece on top of the ends of the other two pieces. After forming one long strip, I overlapped the ends and glued them in a "v" shape so that it would lay flat around each child's neck.

  • Pins: I looked online for free coloring sheets and full-color images and resized them to about 2" x 2". I printed these for my children to color. (Next time, I would also have the kids draw their own pins.) After coloring, we cut each image out and laminated them. (Here is our laminator.) Once the laminated pins were cut out, we attached them to the lanyard using a glue gun. They turned out adorable!!

    • If I were conducting this activity in a classroom or with a larger group of children, I would have them design or color 6-9 pins, perhaps one more than the number of days we planned to engage with this theme. Each day, students would have 5-10 minutes to trade pins. As the teacher, I would also have 20-30 pins (or 1-2 times the number of students) displayed on a trading board, similar to those found at Disney World. Each student could trade with my board once per day. At the conclusion of the daily trading period, students would need to choose one pin to attach to their lanyard, which they will NOT trade in the future. I would then attach the chosen pin to each lanyard.

• Ear Headbands: Children can cut out and assemble headbands. For my children, I printed a design on the ears, but in the future, I would let them draw their own designs based on their favorite Disney movie. Additionally, this could be a chance for journaling, where the kids can write about why they chose that movie or what their favorite part of that movie is.

• Minnie Hair Bows: To create these bows, we utilized hair bows, Minnie buttons (example 1, example 2), and a glue gun. We used fingernail clippers to remove the loops from the back of the buttons, then applied glue to the button and affixed it to the bow.

• Food: My daughter browsed our Disney cookbook and picked out meals and desserts she found appealing. Throughout the week, we prepared: fried chicken, funnel cake, mini-corn dogs (and corn cakes using the leftover batter). We also thought about making: Mickey pretzels, pulled pork nachos, chocolate-covered bananas, and s'mores. (The cinnamon rolls from the book are a family favorite, especially during holidays!)

• Tie Dye: We tried to create a Mickey face on our tie-dye shirts. My daughter insisted on doing hers without help, and even the one I made for my son didn't have a complete Mickey head. So, we used fabric paint to correct the Mickey image and added glow-in-the-dark puffy paint around it!!

Educational Activities

• Plan the trip: I created worksheets for my daughter to practice mainly math and language arts material while "planning our trip"/our week:

  • Park Days: This worksheet provided her with the crowd prediction calendar for the dates of our themed week. She had to determine which park she wanted to visit each day (one park per day, with no repeats). This decision determined the parks we visited on the other four days of our themed week. I kept in mind which movies/characters were featured in each park to plan which roller coaster videos we watched, which Disney movie we watched, which pins my kids were given for their lanyards, and which designs I had printed on the ears of their headbands.

  • Transportation: This worksheet provided details about flights from our local airport to Disney and back and another section with details about various options to drive to and from Disney World. On the first section, my daughter had to select which flights she preferred and calculate the total travel time and the subtotal for the family flying. On the second section, she had to select a driving route, calculate the total travel time, mileage, and estimated fuel cost. Finally, she had to compare both options and decide which one we should choose, justifying her choice.

  • Lodging: This worksheet provided details about value and moderate resorts, along with the nightly rates for each resort during our theme week. She had to select one value and one moderate resort and then decide between those, providing justification of her choice.

• Snack Math: I compiled a list of nine snacks with their current prices for my daughter to choose from based on a specified budget. She needed to demonstrate her math by totaling her selections within the budget and then journal about which items she picked and how much she spent. We repeated this exercise with two different snack lists and budget amounts. In the future, I would also have her journal the amount of the budget she didn't spend. Additionally, she had to journal about which snack seemed the most appealing and calculate the cost of buying 3 or 4 of them for our family of 4 (to practice her multiplication).

• Color-by-Number: My daughter is practicing multiplication (3s and 4s), so I created a color-by-number page for her to work on these problems. At the end, she discovered the Goofy image.

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