Summer Camps in NYC?

[Anonymous]

Hi there! We just moved to the area with elementary aged kids, how do I find summer camps for 2025?

TIA

[Anonymous]

Are you looking for local day camps (which is going to be neighborhood based) or putting your kids on a bus every day somewhere outside the city for a more traditional summer camp experience?

[Anonymous]

I am honestly open to anything as we don’t have any experience. We are in Brooklyn.

thanks !

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hi there! We just moved to the area with elementary aged kids, how do I find summer camps for 2025?

TIA

Time out. Mommy poppins.

[Anonymous]

do you want a camp where they will swim a lot? or themed camp - STEM, foreign language, etc?

[Anonymous]

This may be a good place to start

https://www.newyorkfamily.com/campfairs/

[Anonymous]

I would ask around at your kids' school. Not the teachers or administrators, but fellow parents.

[Anonymous]

Check out Park Slope Parents (which services a larger area than just park slope)

[Anonymous]

The big ones are Park Slope Day Camp (Carrol Gardens and Park Slope campus locations), Asphalt Green (private campuses in Tribeca and UES), Chelsea Piers in Chelsea, Manhattan. Buses pick up kids from neighborhood spots if you are not in walking distance to the big 3 summer camps. The private schools Packer, Brooklyn Heights Montessori, Brooklyn Friends, Berkley Carroll offer summer camp options to all community members (don't have to be a student there to participate.)

[Anonymous]

The 14th Street Y runs a standard outdoors/swimming Y day camp on Staten Island with bus pickups in both Brooklyn and Manhattan - haven't done it but people we've talked to seem to like it, unusually large quantity of trees and open space for a NYC-based camp.

Chelsea Piers is also excellent, and huge. I think enrollment just opened for the Wildlife Conservation Society camps so if one of their zoos is convenient for you there might still be space. There are a *ton* of STEM / science / coding camps of varying quality, I don't have any one I'd particularly recommend but Penguin Coding is pretty decent if you're in that part of Brooklyn.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The big ones are Park Slope Day Camp (Carrol Gardens and Park Slope campus locations), Asphalt Green (private campuses in Tribeca and UES), Chelsea Piers in Chelsea, Manhattan. Buses pick up kids from neighborhood spots if you are not in walking distance to the big 3 summer camps. The private schools Packer, Brooklyn Heights Montessori, Brooklyn Friends, Berkley Carroll offer summer camp options to all community members (don't have to be a student there to participate.)

Brooklyn Waldorf in the Clinton Hill neighborhood does this too!

[Anonymous]

Camps are generally enrolled in January so you may have to just take whatever you can get or skip camp this year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Camps are generally enrolled in January so you may have to just take whatever you can get or skip camp this year.

We decided to move to NYC last April and only started signing up for camps in May and still had plenty of options for two middle-grade kids - definitely signing up sooner is better than later, and some things (say, AMNH science camp) do sell out instantly, but if all you want is somebody to supervise your kids while they participate in some combination of reasonably healthy / intellectually-stimulating activities in a safe friendly environment, there are still a ton of choices available.

[Anonymous]

Any camp recommendations for westchester?

[Anonymous]

Depending on where you are in Westchester, Stamford CT has its own Chelsea Piers with a similar assortment of camps to the Chelsea one.

Also I've heard good things about Random Farms theater camps but haven't actually sent a kid there before.