Summer Camp 2026 - Space Week

How appropriate that our final week of summer camp took us to the final frontier! For Space Week, our campers explored aliens, planets, galaxies, spacecraft, and faraway worlds through ceramics, sculpture, painting, collage, engineering, and plenty of imagination.

We blasted off with ceramic painting, transforming little alien figurines into colorful extraterrestrial characters. Campers got creative with vibrant colors, patterns, expressions, and details, and every alien developed a personality completely its own.

Next, we moved into clay sculpture and built our own spaceships using pinch-pot techniques and additives. No two spacecraft looked alike, and campers added all sorts of imaginative features before sculpting tiny extraterrestrial passengers to sit inside and pilot their creations.

For our next project, we combined a little art history, engineering, and outer-space fun to create cosmic wormhole games inspired by the centuries-old cup-and-ball toy. Campers transformed their cups into swirling intergalactic black holes using the colors and patterns of galaxies, then turned the attached balls into tiny stars waiting to be swallowed by the wormhole. Once everyone finished, the studio quickly turned into a cosmic game tournament!

Then we took a closer look at the planets in our solar system before creating mixed-media space collages. Campers painted dreamy backgrounds filled with colorful nebulas, distant galaxies, clouds of cosmic gas, and clusters of stars. They then watercolored their own imaginary planets, cut them out, and layered everything together to create beautiful scenes with a sense of depth and distance.

Next, it was time to become space engineers! Using cardboard and paper construction techniques, campers designed their own Mars rovers, thinking about the features a vehicle might need to explore another planet. They added wheels, antennas, solar panels, cameras, and plenty of their own inventive upgrades.

Of course, our rovers needed somewhere to explore! Campers created Mars landscapes by layering strips of paper and experimenting with textured paint techniques to build rocky red terrain beneath otherworldly skies. The finished scenes looked wonderfully surreal and cinematic, like landscapes straight out of a science-fiction adventure.

For our final art project, Miss Diana led campers through a step-by-step drawing of a UFO hovering above the landscape and beaming up an unsuspecting cow! We added a kinetic twist by magnetizing the cows so campers could actually move them up and down through the tractor beam, bringing their drawings to life.

Between projects, we played plenty of games, asked a million questions about the cosmos, and had a lot of fun celebrating the end of an incredible summer together. From our first projects of the season to our final journey into space, we loved watching our campers experiment, problem-solve, imagine, and create.

What a way to close out the summer - Space Week was officially out of this world!