This summer, one of our incredible summer staff is taking over the Beacon Blog! Emma “Brio” Deinum will be bringing you highlights of our summer 2020 program, Beacon Unlimited. Here’s a recap about Week 2: Structures.

Let me just say, Week 2 of camp went by so fast! The structures week theme was super fun, with so many great electives and conversations in cabin times. Even Bones dressed up on Theme Thursday for his Keys for Kids devotional reading and had a cool construction themed example in his video. You can check the Beacon Instagram page for the daily readings throughout the week! A great way to start the day!

With so many awesome elective choices this week, there are so many fun things to say about what went on in these electives. There was an Indoor Fort Building elective, where campers learned fort building techniques such as how to build cone forts, chair forts and table forts. On the final day they had a challenge to build a castle fort and use all their techniques! In Storytelling, the campers worked on creating legends and writing about how things came to be, for example, how was pizza invented? During the Edible Structures elective, campers (and leaders!) had a blast making different shapes and structures from food, and constructed everything from unicorn cakes to log cabins with carrots and celery.

Logic had a lot to say about the Edible Structures elective, which he was doing with Dash, so here’s a quick tidbit from his view during this elective: “On Tuesday, Dash and I had a debate regarding which is better, celery or carrots. Dash took the side of celery and I had the privilege of fighting for carrots. During each phase of the battle for victory, carrots were in the lead and this was later confirmed for the win when nearly all the campers, a carrot and celery farmer, and even Dash herself decided that carrots were better for both the categories of growing and eating.”

Continuing on with our electives list, there was the LEGO Land elective where campers got to build with their LEGO, watch a few videos on LEGO speed builds and world records and competed in a build the tallest tower competition. In Paper Construction Site, there were a lot of fun creations made with construction paper (who knew you could make such cool things with paper?). Circuit, who was in the elective, showed me a really cool colourful papered fish that looked really complicated to make. And the final elective was Minecraft Builds Beacon, which I led with Circuit. It was so much building the lighthouse, the dining hall, and other classic Beacon structures, but also building treehouses and secret bunkers. Not only was it really great to see all the fun creations every camper made, but also seeing their own ideas on the different structures, everyone was so creative!

Now July is half over, which means we are entering week 3 of Beacon Unlimited. It’s so weird to write that - the first two weeks have really flown by! I can’t wait for the Survivor camp theme next week though: I’ve been working on a special video series with the Summer Staff that we can't wait to share with all of you. If I haven't mentioned before, our summer staff for Beacon Unlimited consists of myself, Shimmer, Circuit, Riff, and Logic. Along with Dash and Kodiak, we’ve all been working hard on not only camp planning and materials, but also making fun videos for everyone to enjoy and get excited for the upcoming week of camp. I’m super excited for the videos next week, so enjoy this behind the scenes photo of myself in the process of recording a video and get ready for another awesome week of camp!

Until next time,
Brio :)