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Greetings all and Happy Fall

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From The Birch Hill Team

Happy Fall Birch Hill Family.
Here is the gorgeous view from the top of Mount Major!
We hope you are all embracing the fall!

While the younger cabins spent the day at Whale’s Tail Water Park, the older cabins split up into 8 teams, each representing the country or territory of their choice. Each team created a personalized flag to take with them to each event and wore matching team colors. The Opening Ceremonies featured a torch and an explanation of how the day would work, and then the teams were sent to test their skills!

With events ranging from archery to Birch Hill style curling, everybody found a strength to bring to their team.  After lunch we took the competition down to the waterfront to cool off, and the teams competed in activities like bellyflop and sandcastle competitions. At the Closing Ceremonies, the scoreboard revealed that France came in third, Narnia came in second, and Soviet Russia took the gold! Such a great S day!

To beat the heat, we moved our weekly dance outside to the dodgeball arena and danced the night away under the stars! To kick off the night, the dance classes impressed the rest of us with what they’d been working on all session.  Later on, the winners of the coveted Birch Hill Cup were announced. Drumroll please…. Cabin C for the girls and Cabin 7 for the boys!!!

The campfire was tons of fun! We sang all our Birch Hill favorites, like Baby Shark, Super Lizard, Wisconsin Milk, and of course Crazy Moose.  In a closely contested best two out of three screaming match, the girls narrowly beat out the boys. In the words of our counselor Matt, “the energy was as high as the flames!”

Birch Hill campers stepped out in style at the casino-themed dance!  Every Friday night our CITs transform the Rec Hall, decorating it with balloons and streamers and using our new lazer lights to their full potential to give the campers a fun-filled night to let loose and show off their moves.

The first day of each session is full of name games, and in photography class we like to put our own twist on that.  After a quick lesson on basics, the campers are sent out to find the letters of their names in the trees, buildings, and anywhere else they can around camp.  Here are an S, an A, and an M!

Next we talk about light – the different colors it can have, the way it moves through some things and bounces off others, and how shooting with your light source in different places relative to your subject drastically changes how the image comes out.  The campers take pictures of shadows, reflections, and anything else they see that looks cool or interesting to them!

The next class we use the macro lens to learn about depth of field and composition.  The kids play with focusing on the foreground or the background and we talk about textures and patterns, still keeping in mind how the light affects the image.

Our last class is a photo scavenger hunt that sends campers all over camp to take pictures of things like a CIT doing a handstand, a human pyramid of six or more people, and 17 forks arranged in a creative pattern!

In honor of the release of the final Harry Potter movie this Friday, Birch Hill counselor Big Will hosted our first ever Wizarding Chess tournament as a Personal Choice activity.  In Wizarding Chess, the game is brought to life, as each camper takes on the role of a chess piece on a life-sized chess board.  Check out some pictures of this fun-filled Potter-tivity!