Week 10- River Art- Camp Recap

We cannot believe we just wrapped up our final week of SPREE summer camp for 2021! What an amazing summer, and this week’s theme of River Art was a creative, fun way to wrap up the summer. 
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We got right to work on Monday when during our first activity we created art journals to use throughout the week, studied the color wheel, and created name collages to meet our fellow artists for the week. We also had our first critter crawl on Monday! An activity we do each day at camp to catch and observe the macroinvertebrate critters that live along the river’s bottom. To wrap in art, campers began our week-long macro art project, where we worked on gluing nature materials down on our giant macroinvertebrate for a collaborative art project! 

Tuesday’s theme was “the river as inspiration”. As it sounds, our beautiful landscape at SPREE camp can definitely inspire art creations. We started our day with critter crawl. While catching and observing crawdads, mayflies, and other macroinvertebrates, we also continued work on our collaborative macroinvertebrate art project. It is coming along nice!

Our second activity was a very special guest. A local artist, Kim Gagnon came to camp and instructed our campers with a “paint and sip” (water) style painting class right along our river! It was wonderful to see our campers put their personal, creative spins on their canvas as they were painting along to the instructions of our guest! 

The theme of Wednesday was focused on creating art inspired by nature, not just our river. We started with several art projects that used nature as a medium and material. We created some yarn weaving templates from sticks. Using yarn, we weaved using these materials! In addition to using sticks as a medium, campers also created pounded leaf art using collected leaves and a hammer. It was fun to get some energy out in a creative way to make some cool looking art!
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I bet you can guess what we did alongside critter crawl this day… our collective art project! Each day our giant macro was getting filled out with natural materials, and the shape of the macro really began! This art project is a great inspiration to find the same macros and others in our river. Sometimes you have to look closely for these macros, because they sometimes just look wiggly in their nets!

Thursday was field day at camp. We spent most of the day outside at Johnson Habitat Park and our theme was focused on public art. We didn’t just keep our eyes out for public art in the park, but we created some ourselves! Campers experimented with chalk bombs which created explosions of color along the trails in the park. They also yarn bombed the trees and fencing in the park by hanging colorful yarn creations around the park. Of course we ended the day with a Critter Crawl!

Friday was our final fun Friday at SPREE camp this summer! Our theme was appropriate for the final day of camp, that art is meant to be shared! We created kindness rocks for campers to place around camp, or take back to their neighborhood to spread creative kindness. We also completed another collaborative project to leave at camp- a painted tree branch! 
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Our final critter crawl was so fun- We finished our giant macroinvertebrate project! It was also awesome to get into the river one last time with our campers to find and observe as many critters that we could in our South Platte River. Of course we ended the week with an art walk and graduation!
We look forward to all our upcoming School Break Camps this fall at SPREE, and are pumped to be back next summer as we are planning to return to two full summer camp locations!

SPREE hopes to see you and your family down at the river again soon!