Summer Camps
Why a Maine Camp?
Families have chosen Maine camps for their children for more than a century.
The state’s immense natural beauty – rivers and lakes, rugged mountains, nearly 3,500 miles of coastline – provides an incomparable setting for outdoor learning and adventure. Maine camps go beyond wilderness immersion, they create environmental stewards and outdoors enthusiasts, and they also help develop skills in sports, visual and performing arts, and even robots and rocketry. They foster growth in youngsters while instilling timeless values: teamwork, responsibility, and mutual respect.
Camps, whether public or private, share one mission. Here are some tangible benefits from spending time at a Maine Summer Camp:
- Create community and friendship through unplugging from 21st-century technology
- Encourage initiative, confidence, and leadership skills
- Stimulate an appreciation for nature
- Promote exercise, activities, and play
- Foster experiential learning
- Hands-on learning is abundant at Maine Summer Camps, across a broad variety of subjects. This education sticks with kids and helps foster interests that can carry on to educational pursuits, careers, and lifelong vocations.
UMPI offers summer camp opportunities
When college graduation ends, it’s easy to assume that things “shut down” for summer, but at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, it’s just the start of another season–summer camp. From an invention-focused camp for youth to a Massachusetts-to-Maine mission trip to a camp just for visiting Chinese students, the campus is abuzz with activity all summer long. And while not all camps and programs are open to everyone, there are several exciting options to consider. Here are details about overnight camp and day camp opportunities available to the community.
Overnight Camps
Upward Bound
- mid-June to early August
- Serves about 130 high school students
- The goal of all three programs TRiO College Access Services offers is to help students with the motivation and skills they need to get into college and then succeed and earn a degree.
- FMI: http://www.umpi.edu/trio-college-access/upward-bound-and-ets/
Dutch Soccer Academy
- Two weeks of programming from early- to mid-July
- Serves about 150 students the first week; and about 130 the second week
- The Dutch Soccer Academy offers two weeks of soccer-focused overnight summer camps for youth and young adults at the University of Maine at Presque Isle.
- FMI: http://www.umpi.edu/for-the-community/things-to-do/dutch-soccer-academy/
Day Camps
Project Explore
- One week of programming in late June
- Serves about 100 elementary to middle school students
- Project Explore is a summer enrichment program for students enrolled in grades 2 through 8. It is designed to provide exploratory activities that develop cognitive potential and integrate the talents, skills, and creativity of each individual participant.
- FMI: http://www.umpi.edu/for-the-community/things-to-do/project-explore/
Camp Invention
- One week of programming in late July to early August
- Serves about 50 elementary to middle school students
This is the nation’s premier summer enrichment day camp program supported by the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This week-long camp, especially for students in grades 1 through 6, fosters innovation and creativity while also building self-esteem, teamwork, persistence, and goal-setting skills.
FMI: http://www.umpi.edu/for-the-community/things-to-do/camp-invention/
To connect directly with an UMPI staff person about any of these programs, please contact Lydia Kieffer-Till, UMPI Conferences and Special Programs, at 207-768-9502 or lydia.kieffer@maine.edu.