SPY Camp

Let me start off by saying, this was a VERY involved camp. But we also had the biggest turnout and SO MUCH FUN! You can do this on a budget. You can make big camps in your area that every kid will enjoy if you can get the parents involved.

First: Choose your guest speaker. This should be a historical figure and the person playing them should be committed to dressing up and acting the part. We have found this to be an effective way to get the kids engaged. 

        We chose Nathan Hale, who became known as America's first spy.

Second: Choose your classes. We chose classes with the intent of showing the kids America's legacy of hero's. Classes that we chose are under the table in the middle of the page.

Since we have such a large group of kids, we have parents assigned as "hall monitors" or "door guards" to keep children within the building. This is an ALL HANDS ON DECK event. Typically kids are trying to obey the rules, but please remember that even the best kids don't always remember or know where they're supposed to be. 

All of our kids are signed in at the beginning of camp. They are all given a lanyard with their name, their group name, and on the back is a list of our memory challenges. (Side note, this is not something we have implemented yet but something that we feel is a good idea. There will be children who's parents will not want them photographed. We use red and blue lanyards. If a child is not supposed to be photographed they get a white lanyard. The kids will not notice the lanyard difference, but your photographer can be aware of who they need to keep out of the photos.)

Any extra effort goes a long way, we bought brown paper rolls in the office supply section at walmart. rolls were $5 each and we used less than two. These were used for table runners and also an insignia on the front of the building.

Insignia inner blue circle is the size of a pie pan, outer circle was hand drawn so to distract from its irregular shape we added the points around the circle. This was all drawn and colored with pencil first and colored in with markers. Kids were then stopped in the entryway and "wanded" by our "security staff" (we had several of our youth leaders come to training before camp to learn how to check people in to our high security spy facility. Our wands were just short plastic pipes. This was such a great step and really set the tone for our kids.) Kids were instructed to come in disguise since they were training to be spies. There were lots of wigs and sunglasses, we even had one kid come dressed as an old man.

All kids had to punch in the correct code on their keypad 1776 (keypads are calculators that we used stick tac on the doors) Kid in the suit is one of our Youth Leaders trained to make sure each person that came in punched in the correct code. We had two keypads for faster entry into the building.

As the kids progressed through the hallway they were required to do a hand scan and also scan their nametags. You don't have to be high tech for this to be fun. 

This is the inside of our "scanning" machine. Its's just a gift box with a small hole cut so a glow stick will emit a light underneath it. We then attached it to another box so there was room to scan a card. Presto! Magic name tag scanner.

All of our kids were then admitted to our room where we began our meeting. We always start with singing "O I Love America" to help them settle in. We hold a flag ceremony, recite the pledge and sing the first verse of the National Anthem. You can reference our class schedule up top. We always make sure to have a game during class time as well. This time it was a laser maze and bomb maze.

Lasers are red yarn with jingle bells tied to them so kids know if they touched a laser. Remind kids to take off jackets. We had several kids do really well only to have to start over because their hood on their jacket caught a strand of yarn.

Bomb maze is a partner activity. Helium balloons and spikey balloons we found on amazon. One partner wears a blindfold and the other directs them to the other side of the room, hopefully, without hitting any bombs.

We ended the evening with an escape room where the kids had to use knowledge learned in the classes to help solve puzzles. Each of the five teams puzzles eventually lead to a portion of the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Every table had a pocket edition with part of their code to get into the safe written in invisible ink within it. So the beginning of the preamble would know their instructions go first. We were lucky enough to have a family with a personal safe that we were aloud to use. So your instructions for opening the safe will be different than ours. I'll make an actual post with some of our puzzles to help you get an idea of what you can do. It is totally doable on a budget I PROMISE. 

This is the view the kids got as they entered the escape room from the stage. All groups had their names on a table so it was obvious where they were to start. Please keep in mind that little kids are going to want to go find clues immediately. We had to reset several puzzles because the little kids were taking anything that looked like a clue. I would just suggest that you go over some rules with kids before they start looking at the items in the room. We used face cards to distinguish who's clue was who, but you could also use stickers that were individualized to each group.

Each kid was rewarded with the rank of spy, a pocket declaration of independence, sunglasses, and a invisible ink pen. We had created badges for the parents last minute and it would be fun to include a spy badge for each of the kids. Ours were just color printed and laminated.