Life at the Bay

Children are spending an increasing amount of time indoors due to all the technology that can be easily accessed inside their homes. The internet, television, mobile phones, gaming consoles and tablets have replaced traditional outdoor games, such as hopscotch, hide and go seek, tag and field sports. Outdoor play offers social, mental and physical benefits for children. Outdoor play is an essential part of summer camps, where technology isn’t allowed and children can overcome their “nature deficit disorder”. Here are five reasons why you should send your kids to summer camp for them to indulge in outdoor play:    1. Combat Obesity Due to technology turning our kids into couch potatoes, lack of exercise is the main reason why kids are becoming obese. Children should be active for at least an hour a day, which means they should be running, climbing and jumping in the outdoors. Summer camp programs have kids active in the outdoors all day long whilst still having ...

The reality is; not all kids are born water babies, swimming lessons don’t come cheap, not all of us can afford to maintain pools in our homes or a gym membership whereby you get access to a pool, and, most of us as parents are mortified about letting our children get in touch with water.    We really do have every right to be concerned about water safety, since all children care about is the amount of fun they’re having. Their own safety is not even a thought that crosses their mind, which makes it our responsibility as parents to ensure that they’re safe.    Most children come to Sugar Bay Resort, a holiday camp for kids and teens without the knowledge of what a beach is and leave having adapted expert skills in at least one type of water sport.   The camp, which is located on the dolphin coast of KwaZulu-Natal, has private access to the local lagoon and beach. The locations warm climate makes water temperatures great for swimming and variou...

  A simple task that gets your creative juices flowing definitely has to be chalk drawing. Our campers love this activity at Sugar Bay. It’s such a quick and easy way to keep them occupied should any of our programs run a little off-schedule, and, in the process, allows us to discover some remarkable talents.    Here’s some ideas on how to prepare for and run this class: The Art of Chalk Drawing   You will need: · Previously prepared artwork (Sourced from the internet and printed out) · Clean floor surface that isn’t too rough or too smooth · Chalk (in every colour) · Tape Measure Instructions: Step 1: Selecting an image You will need to provide your campers with a wide variety of previously prepared artwork that is inspirational and easy to duplicate. You can divide the artwork into three categories of difficulty: beginners, intermediate and expert, to accommodate the different age groups.   Step 2: Analyzing the image Once your...

At Sugar Bay, our campers love it when we get food involved in our Arts and Crafts classes. One of our popular Arts & Crafts activities with food has to be biscuit decorating.    After getting our campers to bake their own biscuits, we get them to decorate them with royal icing. Their creativity really comes out to play when they indulge in this activity.  Here are 3 very important techniques we taught our campers to use when icing biscuits: Technique 1 - Line Icing:   Tip: Ensure that your line icing is the same texture of toothpaste – slightly thick and gooey.   Line icing is basically an outline around a shape. People would use this technique if they are going to fill the inside of the outline with flood icing. You need to make sure that you create an outline that does not have any gaps. If there are any gaps, the flood icing will flow through and your biscuit will not look very attractive. A piping bag with a narrow cut is the best i...