My 3 year old girl is an absolute sweetheart. She talks about our summer camps all the time. Honestly, I hadn’t thought they’d made that much of an impact on her since she would drift in and out, playing independently for a good portion of each day. Starting around October, she began asking for more camps. After reminding her that with the school year getting back into full swing, that wasn’t really something we could do, but she kept asking so patiently and sweetly that it finally came to me. Her big brother and sister are both in school in some capacity these days, and while she is in her own preschool a few times a week, occasionally - only every couple weeks, generally - there is a day where it’s just her and me hanging out for the morning. I immediately told her to pick a theme, and I would design a preschool camp day JUST for her! It was a hard choice, but she eventually picked “flowers.” Yes, in November. I got to planning, and as soon as my scheduled hours worked out in a way that made it happen, she got her flower camp!

We are focusing a lot on letter identification these days. I made her a big poster with the letter F in upper and lowercase, each block letter full of different types of flowers for coloring. Right up her alley, and something she could return to as much as she wanted throughout the day. It also gave us an easy dropcloth for doing other activities and not worrying as much about using trays, which was freeing for the day! And by the end of the day, she was consistently identifying the letter F. Wins all around!

The other letter-focused activity was making the names of flowers with magnetic letters. I put all the needed letters on the board and told her what word we were making, then asked her to find each letter in order. When she found the right one, she moved it to the other side of the board and eventually put them all in the right order. We worked on this throughout the morning (our magnetic letter set has lots of duplicates, and I’d pre-made 8 or so different fower names and divided the groups of letters into a muffin tray.) B7 and G5 also enjoyed their own variation on this game later on in the day. For G5, I told her the name of the flower and she put the letters in order. For B7, I just gave him the scrambled letters; he had to unscramble them without knowing what he was aiming for!

3 year olds need to move, and my little one is no exception! We took a break from sitting at the table to go for a little walk. We took a box and a pair of scissors, and set to collecting some flowers from around the yard. Thank goodness our climate allows for that! I generally do not let them collect things out of nature unless it is already lying on the ground (and even then, just in their own neighborhood, never out of parks) so this was a special treat, and we talked about only collecting from where the flowers were plentiful. When we returned, we set these aside to dry. At this point, G3 took a break from camp for some independent play - she had focused for a long time!

When she was ready to come back, I had attached the collected flowers to lollipop sticks and gotten some paint ready for her to experiment with her flowers as natural paintbrushes. I wasn’t sure she’d go for it, but she had a ball trying out all the different textures!

I do always try to work in some sort of sciene, which in this came came in the form of a “parts of a plant” activity. We made a stack of sections of TP tubes and added cut paper flower parts to them - roots, stem, leaves, and flower!

Next, I set up a little “invitation to create” with cut paper stems, leaves, and flower parts.

Our final activity of the day was a little practice in 1:1 counting. G3 drew some flower stems, then we picked numbers of petals to add to each with fingerprints.