Aleisha

2014 Camp Role:
Counselor

Key Qualifications:
4-H Leadership Camp
Ontario Student Leadership Conference
Student Senate Member, Student Council President

Favourite Book:
The Fault In Our Stars

Favourite Movie:
The Breakfast Club

What is your personal theme song?
Never Too Late by Hedley

What is your greatest fear?
Failure

What’s your guilty pleasure?
Hot chocolate

When I have an hour of free time, I like to…
Go horseback riding or read

What are you most excited about for summer 2014?
I’m excited to meet new people and make memories. I love learning new things and think that this will be a great learning experience for me.

The “birthday train of cupcakes and embarrassment”

2014 Camp Role:
Programmer

Number of years at MKDC:
2014 will be Summer #2!

Key Qualifications:
Former CanSkate Assistant
Student at University of Toronto (1st year complete)
Accomplished musician

What is your favorite snack food or candy?
Twizzlers pull and peel… you can make braids out of them! And then eat them! It’s the perfect camp candy.

What is your favorite book or movie?
For me, its fair game between Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. And obviously the books are a million times better than the movies.

What is your favorite camp activity?
Gah there are too many great camp activities to pick a favorite! Can I pick a camp day? Because colour wars are definitely my favorite.

What is your personal theme song?
Can I cheat the system and say what genre is my jam? Because big band swing music is my thing.

What is your greatest fear?
Losing sight of happiness, and pursuing something that isn’t fulfilling.

What is your funniest habit?
I sneeze in bright sunlight. It’s pretty annoying.

What is your most embarrassing moment?
There are too many embarrassing moments in my life for me to have a “most” embarrassing moment. (Kristen’s note: How about your camp birthday? tee hee)

When I have an hour of free time, I like to…
Sit down with a mug of freshly brewed coffee, and a good book!

Share in a few sentences what you are most excited about for summer 2014:
I’m most excited to spend time with my family, taking a break from the city, and working at camp again! I’m excited to be working with new people, seeing new faces, and experiencing new camp activities and programming! I’m excited to get started on some big and awesome changes to camp, it’s going to be a fantastic summer!

What is the best Maple Key tradition?
I think the best camp tradition is the closing ceremonies that take place on Fridays. Sitting around a cardboard fire, singing camp fire songs, and looking back at all of the things that have happened… It’s so great to be able to recognise the amazing stuff that campers have been doing, and it’s so rewarding to see new and old campers having bonded. It’s such a wonderful end before the weekend!

Emmet at work

2014 Camp Role:
Programmer

Number of years at MKDC:
2014 will be Summer #3!

Key Qualifications:
Child & Youth Worker (1st year) & Early Childhood Education (1st year)
Previously a counselor at Artmakers Day Camp

What is your favorite camp activity?
Making up new camp activities!

What is your greatest fear?
Losing friendships.

What is your funniest habit?
As my campers know, I tend to sing instructions, particularly when I get the feeling campers aren’t paying attention. Hey, it works!

What’s your guilty pleasure?
It bums me out that there seems to be so little overlap between fair trade candy and fun candy. I love me some hoity toity chocolate bars with fancy ingredients, but I definitely succumb to the fun side (poprocks! stuff that makes your tongue blue! gummy everything!) more often than I care to admit.

What you are most excited about for summer 2014?
New majors! Old majors! New campers! Old campers! New staff! Old staff! New jokes! Old jokes! New beads! New songs! Old songs! New verses to old songs! Old verses to new songs? COLOUR WARRRRRS!!! (Okay, that was more than a few and they were sentence fragments, but that is how I feel.)

What is the best Maple Key tradition?
It’s a new-ish one, but I really love Friday “campfires”, with the singing and the bead ceremony and the cardboard fire. It sends us into the weekend on such a cozy note, and gives us a chance to recognize and appreciate all the cool stuff we made happen for each other over the week. Camp is a little mini universe we all create together, and campfire is when we get to take a breath between whirlwinds and feel how magical and great and special it is. (Hi, I’m the counsellor who ALWAYS CRIES, can you tell?)

What is your favorite camp memory?
The crackling energy of “oh my galoshes this is great this is going so great this is actually possibly the best day ever” when, in spite of all that could have put a damper on it (chilly weather, bidding confusion, the march of time), Camp Auction 2013 suddenly transformed into this inexplicably, transcendently whimsical experience, a chaotically glorious parade of joy. Really felt like the stars aligned in this very precarious and therefore perfect way that day. (No pressure, Camp Auction 2014.)

Something else you may not know…
Emmet is a budding author in the young adult fiction genre.

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Ron and I took another day trip on Saturday to visit another yurt company. What we really liked about Yurta is that we had the opportunity to meet directly with the owner (who is also the chief builder) rather than a company representative. We also liked Yurta’s focus on all natural materials – no vinyl smell inside this baby! And because Yurta yurts are built locally, they are specifically designed and tested to withstand our Eastern Ontario climate. (The fact that we wouldn’t have to pay any shipping charges doesn’t hurt either.)

The Yurta is very tent-like in some respects but not in others – for example, because of the reflective covering on the outside of the felt insulation and the operable dome skylight at the top, the Yurta can actually be kept quite cool, especially if built in the shade. The windows can be taken down to their screens allowing for further airflow, but you can also put up the awnings to keep out more of the sun. It’s amazing how much light is inside, even on an overcast day – they are very bright.

Plans are for two 21′ diameter Yurta yurts, which would allow us to have a separate meeting spaces for our Lower (Sprouts & Shoots) and Upper (Heartwood & LIT) campers.

Don’t know what this is all about? Read about our plans for a new facility in 2015.

MKDC Water Bottle Mock-Up

We’re ordering new camp water bottles this week!

Our water bottles are stainless steel and BPA free (safe for you AND the environment!), with a wide mouth opening for easy drinking, and hold up to 16 oz. They even come with a carabiner so you can clip it onto your bag, belt loop, or whatever!

EVERY camper who registers for the summer on or before Saturday, April 26th will get one for FREE!

The only catch is… you have to come to visit us at our booth at Maple Fest to pick it up! We’ll be in the Crystal Palace – so come say hi and pick up your bottle!

Sewing is a useful life skill but also a limitless and inexpensive creative outlet. Campers will:

• Design clothing and accessories from scratch
• Use sewing patterns
• Create mood boards, sketches, and illustrations
• Learn sewing tips and stitching techniques (both hand & machine)

No prior experience necessary!

Ron and I took a drive yesterday to look at a few examples of one of the types of yurt we are considering for our new facility in 2015. These are photographs of a model very similar to what we are considering (keep in mind, this model is over 17 years old – we’d be getting a new one!)

28′ Diameter Yurt – 615 square foot interior with French Doors

View of the log rafters from inside – the dome skylight in the middle has a screen and can be opened for ventilation.
With the combination of the dome, French doors, second door with window, and 4 side windows this thing is FULL of natural light!

Click here for more updates on our countdown to 2015!

I remember a conversation I had with my mother during my university years. I was lamenting all the many directions I wanted my life to go and she told me, “Honey, you can’t do everything. You need to pick something and stick to it.”

But I was barely out of highschool and wasn’t interested in listening to my mother… and it’s probably one of the few instances when I’m glad I DIDN’T (at least not right away). I proceeded to take a whole bunch of university courses in a variety of interesting things that had nothing to do with each other: my music courses, but also environmental geography, English, even computer programming. I kept up with dance, even though it was never something I could be capable of doing professionally. I just dabbled in stuff.

Perhaps obviously, as I got older and my career evolved, I eventually let some things drop. I don’t take dance classes regularly anymore but I do still perform in local musical theatre (sometimes I even do the choreography). Those skills I picked up through my dabbling though seem to pop up in interesting ways – that computer programming course is what has allowed me to create our own dynamic camp schedules. While my mom was right – I couldn’t do everything (at least not forever), keeping my range of experiences open early on has had a lasting impact on the things I’ve been able to do, and it’s contributed HUGELY to the development of camp.

When I’m hiring my staff, I find myself looking for the same range of experiences – not that I need my staff to have the same interests and credentials that I do, but that they have DONE THINGS to amass a range of skills. Camp staff who have no skills to pass on to their campers have very little to offer our programming. They also don’t model the importance of life-long learning.

The more experience I have with the education system, the more I recognize how we seem to be churning out kids who haven’t had much exposure to variety. I hear about campers who don’t have time to attend March Break camp because they have too much homework. (Why are kids who are still camper age being given so much work for their holiday?) By grade 9, kids are forced to choose only ONE arts course – either music, drama, or visual arts (which, if you are a kid like I was, is akin to being forced to cut off one of your arms). Even if parents are willing and able to enroll their children in extracurricular sports, chances are they’ll only have the time and the resources to participate (ie specialize) in just one. What are the chances they’ll happen to pick “the” sport on the first try?

Kids should not be brought up to be one-trick ponies (or worse, kids who only pursue academic courses). Kids should have the freedom to explore a range of experiences, to try out a wide variety of things – whether they’re “useful” or not. Not just to make them more well-rounded, but also to develop hobbies and interests that will provide stress relief and enjoyment later in life. When it DOES come time for them to grow up and stop doing everything, they’ll have the prior knowledge to make an informed decision about what it is they’d really like to do.

That’s one of the things I love about camp – we let kids dabble. Just look at the huge list of activities they get to try out.