Ages
Rising Grades, Pre-K to 8th Grade
June 20th - July 1st, 2016
July 5th - July 15th, 2016
July 18th - July 29th, 2016
August 1st – August 5th
August 8th – August 12th
August 15th – August 19th
August 22nd – August 26th
August 29th – September 2nd
Kids are busier than they ever have been. Over stimulated and overloaded, many families struggle to find time to balance their children’s lives with recreational play and focused exploration. As a progressive school, Bank Street is focused on the development of children academically, but also with regard to their social and emotional growth. The Bank Street Summer Camp provides time and structure for campers to develop as learners through love of play, creativity and collaboration, all outside of an academic environment.
Summer time offers an opportunity for parents to add balance to children’s lives and the time is right for schools and camps to teach the whole child, beyond academia and scholastics. Children need time, practice and a safe environment to connect with themselves and each other. Bank Street College has spent almost one hundred years making these goals a reality and the Bank Street Summer Camp has continued this tradition in a recreational summer setting.
The goal of the Bank Street Summer Camp is to foster emotional, physical and ethical growth within campers and kids, by using educational professionals to help them develop their own personalities and individual voices through love of play, creativity and collaboration. Through experiential education, we seek to strengthen not only individuals, but the community and larger society as well, in which adults and children, in all their diversity, interact, and learn. We see, in both Camp and our weekend programs, the opportunity to educate and build a better society.
We celebrate the individual child, creating a positive camp culture and zest for living that encourages exploration and problem solving. The positive environment is also reflected through the vast diversity of camp, including ethnicity, family structure, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation and learning styles. This environment recognizes and celebrates the differences between campers, staff and families, while teaching children to respect one another’s peoples/cultures/life choices/way of life.
At camp, we encourage campers to deepen their ideas, extend their thinking and come up with their own story lines, fostering the most essential building block for imagination, helping campers do what they do best: play.
Developmentally, kids are able to focus on more specific activities and projects as they get older. Starting in second grade, our Middle Camp and Upper Camp programs campers have the opportunity to choose from a variety of programs specifically focused on Sports, Spanish Immersion, Science & Technology, and Musical Theater, where they can write their own Musical. All programs can be taken on a two week basis, except for our Theater and Film programs, which are four-week commitments.
Our remarkable staff members are made up of graduate students from the Graduate School, alumni from the Bank Street College of Education Graduate School as well as various outside specialists, teachers and professionals in the fields. Passionate about their work and dedicated to the camp and the campers, they bring out the best in children. Our staff body is very diverse with respect to family structure, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation and learning styles.
Many campers return to camp as counselors because of their positive experience as campers. One third of campers go to the Bank Street School during the year, making a large portion of the camp body from other schools in the New York City area. We have gone beyond the standards of a traditional camp venue by offering focused groups like Spanish Immersion, Travel, Film and Science. We have also entered into numerous collaborations with major NY museums, including the Liberty Science Center and the Rubin Museum.
Our activities are really based on what is developmentally appropriate for each age group. Our Lower Camp, which is Pre-K to 1st grade, offers a Spanish immersion program as well as our regular Day Camp option. As campers get older our programs become more focused, so our Middle Camp and Upper Camp programs, from 2nd to 8th grade, offer developmentally appropriate focuses on Musical Theater, Sports, Spanish, Travel, Science, STEAM and Film Writing and Production.
All groups take swim instruction in our beautiful outdoor private pool in Riverdale, which is a 15-minute bus ride. We also provide lunch and snack to each group.
At Camp, we believe that swimming is life skill. Teaching kids how to swim challenges them, while also provides a measurable feeling of success. At Bank Street Summer Camp, campers are assessed and put in a swim group that fits their comfort level and skill level. Counselors assist and help supervise with aquatic staff in the water to help facilitate maximum success and safety.
At Bank Street Summer Camp swimming is not a separate program. All campers and staff swim during their designated swim time at our outdoor Sky View pool in Riverdale. Swim time at Camp is divided into both instructional swim and free swim. During instructional swim, counselors and lifeguards work along with the campers to further develop both their comfort and skill in the water. While campers are never made to do anything they do not want to, all campers are required to be in the water.
