Theme of the Week is a post where we ask readers like you to comment with ideas for a particular theme. What ideas and suggestions do you have? What game, craft, apparel choice, theme meal, evening activity, special event, song, skit, or anything else would you do at camp if your theme was…
The Mighty Jungle
Below are my five suggestions. How ’bout you? Leave your ideas in the comments area below.
- Have teams or cabin groups create flags that are decorated like an animal. For example, spots could represent a leopard, stripes for a tiger, green scales for a snake, etc.
- Have a counselor hunt where counselors represent different animals. They can have a card that hangs around their neck that shows what animal they represent. Each “animal” can be worth a different amount of points. Your fastest counselor(s) would be the cheetahs, the climbers are apes or monkeys, the hiders are chameleons, etc.
- If you have a nature center that has a variety of furs, hide them along a hiking trail. When I say hide I mean they should be in plain sight but not obvious. During the hike, the campers should be looking for the furs. For a bonus have one of the camp staff in a Ghillie suit. See if the campers can find him or her.
- Face painting is a perfect fit for this theme.
- Rent a gorilla suit and have the gorilla run around camp or do morning announcements. Maybe the gorilla can bring the camp mail out every day.
1. Make toilet paper roll binoculars. Whatever the age. If you are doing a nature walk, they have to look through their binoculars whenever they see something.
2. Have counsellors act as Animal Trainers. Show the campers what tricks the animals [other counsellors] have learned.
3. Hang a monkey high in a tree. try to knock it out of the tree with wet sponges
4. Catch a monkeys tail game. Basically tag. Make six fabric tails. Six campers wear the tails and run from the animal hunters
Did anyone every make animal head trophies using stuffed animals on wooden plaques ?
That is an interesting idea, Cheryl. I would like to see that.
Diane
The summer program at the school will have a week for a Safari theme. I love the ideas I have read and am also open to other ideas. Please let me know.
Diane, thanks for the comment. I come up with only a few ideas for each theme to help kick-start a programmers creative juices. In the future I would like to create more in depth booklets with many more ideas for those that have a hard time being creative, but that is a project that is going to take some time. My suggestion is to look online for safari crafts, decoration ideas and to take normal camp games and give them a safari twist. Good luck.
We did the animal head trophies last summer for The Mighty Jungle Week and the kids loved it. We used stuffed animals and cut off thier heads and glued them on wooden plaques that we then decorated with leaves, vines, nature items. We tried not to use cuties stuffed animals but we used what we could get donated. These animal trophies we animals that the poachers got to before we could save them with our pretend game reserve officers in the game that we played to tell the kids about poachers and Game Reserves.
That is a very creative idea. Better to have a stuffed animal head on a trophy then a real one. I know of a camp that has a moose head, dear head and a bear rug in their dining hall. Since they were all real animals some campers, staff and rental groups are a little disturbed by them. However, I think people love the animaltronics heads that are sometimes in restaurants and put on a little show. I would love to see a camp with those.