Summer Day Camp
Greetings to all of the wonderful Sense of Wonder Day Camp Parents, Campers and Friends, new and old. We miss you all so much and we hope that you are all happy and healthy.
The 2025 summer camp will be 5 weeks again, from July 7th to August 8th.
COUNSELORS & JUNIOR COUNSELORS:
Counselor Online Application
Counselor Print Application PDF
LEADERS IN TRAINING:
Leader In Training Online Application
Leader In Training Print Application PDF
The Sense of Wonder Summer Day Camp
2025 Schedule:
July 7-11
July 14-18
July 21-25
July 28-Aug 1
Aug 4-8
Our Camp Staff 2025:
Pam Benjamin:
Director & Instructor
Artist, art teacher, dancer, sailor, mother, environmentalist, humanitarian, mentor
Five Adult Instructors: TBA
Leaders in Training: TBA
Summer Camp 2025 Information:
- Sign up for one or more weekly sessions.
- July 7th to August 8th.
- Ages 7–12.
- Monday–Friday; 9–1 pm.
- $330 per week.
- 50% deposit required once we have confirmed your enrollment.
- Cancellations should be made at least one week before your child’s first day of camp. After the one week date a refund will be made only if the space can be filled by another camper.
Financial Aid and Scholarships are available.
The Sense of Wonder Day Camp Schedule 2024
Our 34th Anniversary and Celebration Year
Explanation: Dear Parents and Friends, We will be drawing, painting, making sculptures and mixed media and whatever other art medium interests the campers each week in addition to all the weekly themes and projects mentioned in this Program Schedule. If a camper requests something special, we are always willing to consider it and make it possible. Please let us hear about what your children love to create.
July 8: The Frogtown Mountain Puppeteers, Locally grown and Sustainability, Ceramics and Painting, Farm animals and Heirloom seeds:
Frogtown Mountain Puppeteers is a puppetry troupe based in Bar Harbor, Maine. We are so excited that brothers Erik and Brian Torbeck will join us . Founded in 2000, Frogtown Mountain Puppeteers has performed at festivals, schools, libraries and theatres in the United States and Canada. They write and create all the shows they perform and have received three Citations of Excellence from UNIMA-USA, the highest national award in puppetry.
Marco Nereo Rotelli will be joining us this week to paint with the children. Marco was born in Venice and is an award winning artist. For years Rotelli researched light and the poetic dimension, which Harald Szeemann has defined “an expansion of the artistic contest”.
Rotelli has created a solid relationship between art and other disciplines of knowledge for years. Involving in his research as a consequence, philosophers, musicians, photographers, film directors, but mainly the relationship is between his art and poetry, which has become a constant reference to his work. His works of art are in important museums and private collections all over the world. Important art critics, as well as poets, writers, philosophers and international cultural celebrities have written about him, increasing an important bibliographic collection on his work.
https://www.marconereorotelli.it/en/bio-english/
Kaila Binney: The brilliant and Inspiring Teacher, Environmentalist, Permaculture Leader, Theater Director and Farmer will bring some farm animals and share her farming and environmental Love and Knowledge with the campers.
Chad (Chadwick) Stokes Urmston will be singing with us this week. He is an American musician and a human rights activist. He is the frontman for the Boston-area bands Dispatch and State Radio, and released solo music under the name Chadwick Stokes.
The Campers will get to make puppets, paintings, sculpture, ceramics, make music and use lots of other art mediums we have in our studio.
Parents Relatives and Friends, Please join us on Friday at noon, a Vineyard Farmer will bring samples of their locally grown produce, herbs, and other handmade products. We will also have an art show, creative puppet shows and outstanding speakers.
July 15: Omari Contaste, Caribbean Dance and Culture, Native American Culture and Our Deep Connection to Nature, Animal Sculptures for your Garden, Fossils, Artifacts and Dinosaur bones:
Caribbean Dance and Culture: Omari Contaste’, The award winning dancer and choreographer will be back again by popular demand from the “Forces of Nature” Dance Troupe. Omari will join us this week to show us some really fun Caribbean and other dance movements. He is also a wonderful theater director and playwright. The campers get to write a play with a little direction from the counselors related to our weekly theme. Omari is a force of nature himself. He is very creative and talented in many areas: dance, (Caribbean, Modern and Ballet) Choreography, Performance, Theater and Art.
Traeger Di Pietro, the highly imaginative and creative well known Vineyard artist is coming to camp to do a painting with ideas and inspiration from the campers. The painting will be auctioned off at the Possible Dreams Event this summer to benefit Community Services.
The campers will get to create Wild Animals and Creatures out of Hyper Tufa, to go outside in their vegetable or flower gardens. We will also make creatures out of Clay and Plaster Gauze and fabricate dioramas out of various materials and make lots more art from other mediums we have in our studio.
Biodiversity Works will come by to talk about nature and indigenous animals on our island and show us pictures and educate us about our island wildlife.
A Paleontologist will come and show us his extraordinary collection of dinosaur bones, rare artifacts and fossils.
Parents Relatives and Friends, Please join us on Friday at noon, We will have an astounding art show by the Campers, Brilliant Performances and Speakers.
July 22: The Famous award-winning Author and Naturalist Sy Montgomery and the award winning Naturalist and Illustrator Matthew Patterson, Wilderness Awareness and Animals, Papier Mache’ Creatures:
Sy Montgomery “One of our finest chroniclers of the natural world.” – The New York Times
To research books, films and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire and bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica, worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba and handled a wild tarantula in French Guiana. She has been deftly undressed by an orangutan in Borneo, hunted by a tiger in India, and swum with piranhas, electric eels and dolphins in the Amazon. She has searched the Altai Mountains of Mongolia’s Gobi for snow leopards, hiked into the trackless cloud forest of Papua New Guinea to radio collar tree kangaroos, and learned to SCUBA dive in order to commune with octopuses.
Sy’s 34 books for both adults and children have garnered many honors. The Soul of an Octopus was a 2015 Finalist for the National Book Awards. The Good Good Pig, her memoir of life with her pig, Christopher Hogwood, is an international bestseller. She is the winner of the 2009 New England Independent Booksellers Association Nonfiction Award, the 2010 Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award, the Henry Bergh Award for Nonfiction (given by the ASPCA for Humane Education) and dozens of other honors. Her work with the man-eating tigers, the subject of her book Spell Of The Tiger, was made into in a National Geographic television documentary she scripted and narrated. Also for National Geographic TV she developed and scripted Mother Bear Man, about her friend, Ben Kilham, who raises and releases orphaned bear cubs, which won a Chris award.
Matt Patterson: Matt received a degree from the Art Institute of Boston in Illustration in 2006. Three years later, in 2009, his father, retired from teaching, and he received a contract to write and illustrate a book for the University Press of New England titled “Freshwater Fish of the Northeast.” His father wrote the text while he created all the illustrations. It took them five months to complete this project which contained 61 different species of fish. A lot of fishing was done during the process of researching this book–or, as they liked to tell people, they took many “business trips.” They started a species competition with the goal being who could catch the most species of fish (catch and release) that spring and summer. The book was released in the spring of 2010 and won the 2010 National Outdoor Book Awards Design and Artistic Merit category. The book on Reptiles and Amphibians a few years later, titled The Snake and the Salamander: Reptiles and Amphibians from Maine to Virginia also won a National Outdoor Book Award for Nature and the Environment. In 2023, he had two new books which he illustrated come out, both published by Harper Collins and written by bestselling author, Sy Montgomery. The New York Times national bestseller “Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell”, and the award-winning picture book, “The Book of Turtles.”
He feels it’s crucial not just to document these marvelous species he paints; it’s even more important to him to have a hand in saving them from extinction.
The campers get to make
Steve Lohman and Penelope MacLean: https://www.lineartgallery.com
(Please see Week four for their biographies) Will join us this week to start building a Turtle and an Octopus with the Campers out of Papier Mache’, chicken wire and thick cardboard. The Campers will get to construct Papier Mache’, clay and Sculpey animals as well as use other art mediums we have in our studio.
Parents Relatives, Friends and Community, Please join us on Friday at noon, We will have a wonderful art show, Brilliant Performances and Extraordinary Speakers.
July 29: Eric Bornstein Mask Maker, Portrait artist, Actor and Writer, Stop Motion Animation with Steve Lohman and Penelope MacLean, Multicultural Creative Arts:
Eric Bornstein: Eric has studied with masters Agung Suardana in Bali, and Donato Sartori in Italy. He received his MLA in Fine Arts along with the Thomas Small prize from Harvard University. His masks have appeared most recently in the 31st Cambridge River Festival, Contemporary Theater of Boston’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Performance Lab’s Le Cabaret Grimm, Underground Railway Theater’s Life of Galileo, and the Harvard Yiddish Players’ Shulamis. Over the last 30 years Eric’s masked characters have appeared in a variety of venues. They were a highlight of Boston’s First Night celebration for 15 years. His masks have also appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, the Fuller Craft Museum, the Kennedy Library/Museum, the Boston Lyric Opera, the Boston Ballet, the Society of Arts & Crafts (Newbury Street), The Peabody/Essex Museum, King Richard’s Faire, and Revels. He currently teaches classes in making and performing masks, and offers performances and residencies to schools throughout the state through Young Audiences of Massachusetts.
https://www.behindthemask.org/content.html#about_us
Steve Lohman and Penelope MacLean: will join us this week to work on the Papier Mache’ Turtle and also work with the campers to do their magic with their highly creative Stop Motion Animation videos. Steve Lohman: Steve is an enormously talented artist and sculptor. His work is original and enormously creative, Lohman’s commissions include work created for public, private and corporate including Spalding International, Louis Vuitton Asia, Alvin Ailey Dance Company, Abbott Vascular Europe, The Boston Children’s Hospital, The Boston Symphony Celebrity Series, and Stanford University. Lohman lives in New Orleans and Martha’s Vineyard and is the Artistic Director of Orpheus Wines in Sonoma, California. Steve Lohman’s steel and wire sculptures are three-dimensional line drawings which stand, hang, and bounce in space. Graceful and whimsical, Lohman’s lyrical creations express subtleties of life and forms.
Penelope MacLean: Penelope is from New Zealand, is married to Steve and is a very talented five-star chef, Artist and sculptor. She has sailed around the world cooking on international yachts. She is really looking forward to working with the Campers this summer.
The Campers will get to make Masks, Stop Motion Animation and Art Projects from diverse cultures and use other art mediums we have in our studio.
Parents Relatives, Friends and Community, Please join us on Friday at noon, We will have a breathtaking art show, Brilliant Performances and Phenomenal Speakers.
August 5: Music, Singers Songwriters, pianists Brenda Cline and Paul Smith and Dancer, Singer, Drummer Godfrey Muwulya, Matthew Lawler the Stone Carver. Art Projects from Diverse Cultures, Human and Civil Rights and Antiracism:
Brenda Cline: We are super blessed to have Brenda with us this week. She is a multitalented singer, songwriter, pianist, drummer, educator, artist and more. She taught Art and music for many years in the Tortola, BWI public schools and is a stunning and very accomplished artist, singer, musician. She is a ray of light and joy! Reinforcing interactive , and variety filled songs for all ages, and times.
Love is really the secret ingredient, along with a passion of spreading it in song, and in her daily life. When working on Love Note projects, her music teaching, and recording experience, can be felt and seen.
Around the world venues, will never change that homegrown power. ” Let’s Sing !”
Paul Smith is a very skilled singer, conductor, songwriter and teaches and conducts a choir in Tortola, British West Indies.
The outstanding choreographer, dancer, musician, drummer, actor and singer, Godfrey Muwulya from Uganda Godfrey Muwulya, Master Teacher and performing Artist, began training as a dancer and musician in his native country of Uganda at the age of 5. He was featured in the New York Times and on Martha’s Vineyard through the Yard. He has collaborated with the NYU January study abroad program, and has performed at NYU at the Loewe Theater, Skirball Center, and Radio City Music Hall. He has taught in numerous K-12 schools in NYC in collaboration with NYU Dance Education alumni and also Elementary Schools around Massachusetts and Martha’s Vineyard.
Matthew Lawler: The highly talented Stone sculptor is joining us. Matthew will come in this week for a stunning stone carving workshop. He carves very large or small pieces and is a thoroughly entertaining teacher. Matthew says: During my sophomore summer going into my Junior year of high school, my parents asked me about an idea to move to Italy. I simply asked, “Well, when can I could start packing?” In early February of 2001 I moved to Perugia, Italy for 17 months. In 4 months time I was carving Marble; White Carrara Marble!!!!!
My father met an interesting American living in Italy. He happened to be an artist and carved marble. I was fortunate to be reading “The Agony And The Ecstasy” , a biography of Michelangelo. When asked if I wanted to have stone carving lessons, a dream I didn’t think possible suddenly became a reality. I was able to study multiple times a week for many hours, in a historical stone house, which used to be Roman barracks.
Carving stone is such a special experience, mentally and physically. I created letscarvestone to help share this amazing form of art to anyone who wouldn’t otherwise get the chance.
The campers will also get to make drums and other instruments and do art projects from diverse cultures including painting, ceramics and the potter’s wheel and use other art mediums.
On Friday at noon we will have a beautiful art show, brilliant performances by our visiting artists and campers, eloquent speakers and our end of Summer party. We hope that you will join us and bring all your relatives, friends and community for our end of summer gathering and Celebration.
❤️ ❤️ ❤️
Sense of Wonder Creations Live 2010 CD
Our Sense of Wonder Creations Live 2010 CD is available now at the CD Baby music website. Amazing socially and environmentally conscious songs written and sung by our summer campers and counselors. All the income will be donated to humanitarian and environmental organizations.
Download individual songs or buy the CD Sense of Wonder Creations Live 2010
Summer Camp Photo Gallery!
All photos by Lynn Christoffers
The Power of One
One song can spark a moment
One flower can wake the dream
One tree can start a forest
One bird can herald spring
One smile begins a friendship
One handclasp lifts a soul
One star can guide a ship at sea
One word can frame the goal
One vote can change a nation
One sunbeam lights a room
One candle wipes out darkness
One laugh will conquer gloom
One step must start each journey
One word must start each prayer
One hope will raise our spirits
One touch can show you care
One voice can speak with wisdom
One heart can know what’s true
One life can make the difference
You see, it’s up to you!!
Ashish Ram
(Author Unknown)
I am only one, but still I am one.
I cannot do everything, but still I can do something;
and because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do something I can do.
We don’t need more money,
we don’t need greater success or fame,
We don’t need the perfect body or even the perfect mate.
Right now, at this very moment, we have a mind,
which is all the basic equipment we need to help the world
Be a better place.