By: Amy Cleary
Every parent counts down the days until school is over and thinks about what the kids are going to do for the summer. One of the obvious choices of course is summer camp. The Herald decided to help parents out this year by speaking with Kelly Noseworthy about her summer camp based on brick building fun.
Summer Camp
“There’s never a dull moment,” Noseworthy begins with a laugh as the chat began. With school almost out, Noseworthy and her team are full steam ahead planning fun camp activities.
The fun summer camp concept was created by Bricks4Kidz. The Newfoundland franchise is now in its seventh year and while Noseworthy follows the company’s fun camp suggestions, she also enjoys just being creative on her own – which is what brick-building fun is all about. “Some things we don’t change, because kids love them,” Noseworthy shares running through some of the company’s tried and true summer programs. But why not think outside the box – or the brick, in this case?
All kids love spies, she continues, so she created a Mission Impossible-themed camp that went over really well. “We gave everybody a spy name, we did secret codes. It was fun. Another one we came up with was the Amazing Brick Race. My family are great Amazing Race fans. We thought that would be really kind of cool. Instead of running around, every day we ‘visit’ a different continent.”
In Europe, for instance, they’d construct the Eiffel Tower. But the fun doesn’t end at the building phase. “While there, there’s a snow storm in the Alps, so they have to build a snow plow to plow through the snow. So little challenges like that make it fun.”
The company is based out of St. Augustine, Florida and was started by an entrepreneur named Michelle Cote. Cote was an engineer and an architect and she wanted her kids to have the same passion and interest in engineering that she had. 
One day, a lightbulb went off when she was looking at a LEGO block. Those little blocks of plastic are the world at a child’s fingertips. Just add imagination, and you have something that can not only be fun, but educational as well.
LEGO Adventures
With that in mind, Noseworthy brought the franchise to this province and now has fun helping out at birthday parties, after-school programs, kids night out, and pre-school classes. However, the most popular out of all the programs offered are the LEGO camps. Each camp has a different theme, like comic creator or space adventures, but they all offer the same basic principles of having fun being creative.
As a parent, Noseworthy says she fell deeply in the love with the program. Running the camp out of a classroom in the College of the North Atlantic, Prince Philip Drive Campus, Noseworthy adds she loves meeting the parents every morning as they see their kids off to the beginning of a new LEGO brick adventure. At the end of every day, asking a child how the day went is always the most rewarding of all. Kids enjoy the program so much, parents keep bringing them back for more, she says laughing.
If you think this summer your kids would like to build a monster, create an entire world, or travel to space, what are you waiting for? Get building!
For more visit bricks4kidz.com/canada- newfoundland-stjohns/programs/camps/.