Definitely not! All bright and talented students enjoy our programs.

No! We do challenge kids academically, but GRC is known for engaging children in hands-on activities and encouraging friendships among like-minded peers. Physical activity and recess are part of every day’s schedule.

Yes! Before Care is 7:30 – 9:00 a.m. and costs $120/session. After Care is 3:30 – 5:30 and costs $150/session.

A non-refrigerated lunch (with drink) and a willingness to learn and have fun! We strongly discourage electronic devices.

Limited tuition aid is available, based on need. Contact the GRC office for more details or download the application.

There is also one merit scholarship available for Advanced Space Academy. Download information.

If a camper withdraws on or before May 9, 2026, fees are refundable except $25 application fee. Between May 10 and June 7, 50% of fees may be refunded. No refunds are made after camp starts on June 8.  Payment must be made in full before the first day of camp.

Every child gets a GRC camp t-shirt (and can buy an extra for $10 if desired).

Pictures will be taken during Summer Academies, and may be used for promotional purposes. If you do not want your child’s photo used, please contact the office in writing before the start of camp.

Entering Grade 1

What does a meteorologist do? How can we predict the weather? What are weather fronts and what happens when cold and warm ones collide? Create your own clouds and build a rain gauge, a weather vane & an anemometer! Can we create our own snowflakes? Explore extreme weather like tornadoes and blizzards—why do these happen? We’ll also go on an exploration of how the human body works. What are the different systems, like digestive, cardiovascular, and skeletal? Create a working model of the lungs, make blood in a bottle, simulate how stomach acid works and more!

Entering Grades 2-3

Directing, storytelling, building, editing, designing! In this high-energy, hands-on camp, you’ll use all these skills to create your own mini movies using stop motion animation and iPads. We’ll start off using LEGOS and then step it up to using Play Dough or actual people. You’ll create characters, props, scenery & sound effects! Add in your own music or voice. We’ll also watch clips of different styles of stop motion animation for inspiration and to see how the pros do it. Explore your creativity while learning technical skills! The grand finale will be a mini film festival to premiere everyone’s creations.

Entering Grades 2-4

Experience three camps-in-one each day as you explore Math, Science and Creative Expression!  Explore the physics of force, motion and electrical circuits. Launch airplanes, rockets, cars and wind-powered sailboats to experiment with Newton’s laws. Crash Hot Wheels™ cars to unravel clues about force in motion.

Be a problem solver! Discover how to decode algebraic equations with variables. Race for answers in an Integer Bee. Practice flexible mathematical thinking with games like Hando. Use your critical thinking skills to locate treasures on a giant Cartesian graph.

Use your engineering and design skills to build marble runs and a mechanical butterfly with flapping wings. How do the push/pull forces work? Try new art methods by creating your own Seurat-style pointillistic paintings.

(Students will be divided into age-appropriate groups, with curriculum adjusted accordingly).

(Entering Grades 3 & 4)

Explore Novel Engineering, where stories come to life and our engineering skills will help solve the problems some of our favorite book characters are facing! We’ll dive into captivating book adventures and then use our imagination and creativity to design hands-on solutions to the challenges the characters face. Then we’ll work with friends to design, build, and test engineering solutions for the characters’ problems using simple materials. Whether it’s building a bridge to help a character cross a river or designing a new invention to make the story better, our ideas will bring the story to life in hands-on ways!  Did you take this last summer? Come on back—we’ll have new stories and some new materials to work with. (Novel Engineering is an approach originally developed by Tufts University to teach students the engineering process and link it to problems to fix, all through engaging literature.)

Entering Grades 4-9

Each summer we create a brand-new, sustainable pop-up business! Handle all the real-world aspects of this camp’s pop-up business: finance, sales, marketing & production. Learn about the environmental effects of your product. How can we lessen those? What are low-impact ways to create a high-impact product? Examine cash flow and stock distributions (and play the Stock Market Game!). What will your sustainable business model look like? Create a website to advertise and sell your product. Find environmentally friendly ways to package and distribute. Look at everyday products and their carbon footprints. How can companies minimize this? Scientific inquiry, advertising art, decision-making skills, financial and mathematical interests—bring any and all of these talents!

Entering Grades 4-9

Embark on a journey to one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. Let’s vertically explore the rainforest, ascending from the dark forest floor through the understory and canopy, all the way to the towering emergent layer. You will discover the unique evolutionary adaptations that allow wildlife to thrive in these distinct environments. Beyond the biology, we will investigate the rainforest’s role as a global thermostat, analyzing how this massive biome regulates climate and weather patterns worldwide. Finally, we will tackle the critical issues of deforestation and human impact, discussing how sustainability and conservation efforts are vital to protecting this precious resource for future generations.

Entering Grades 5-9

Hark, bold thespians! Gather for a thrilling fortnight as we plunge into the shadowed and spellbinding world of Macbeth! In this class, we shall breathe life into Shakespeare’s dark tragedy by exploring its haunting language, unraveling its fateful themes, and mastering the craft of stage performance. Together, we’ll forge eerie props, design foreboding sets, and fashion costumes fit for kings, warriors, and witches alike. Each student shall strut and fret upon the stage with a distinct role in our final performance. Let us rehearse with courage, craft with cunning, and bring forth a tale of ambition, prophecy, and destiny most dramatic!

Entering Grade 1

Don your paleontologist hat for dinosaur explorations! Hatch a dinosaur egg, while considering carnivores, herbivores and omnivores. Explore continental drift. Construct fossils and explore body types and teeth structures of dinosaurs. How did they evolve in the different geologic periods? How did their bodies change from fish-like creatures to a tyrannosaurus rex? What made them all extinct? Then join the ‘safari’ as we locate tropical rainforests on a map. Why is the rainforest important? How do plants, as well as animals like monkeys, bats and frogs, survive? Make your own tropical spice blend. What other rainforest resources do we use every day? Lots of hands-on activities and projects.

Entering Grades 2-3

Let’s look into topics like how trees communicate. What exactly do birds feed their hatchlings? In what ways do trees support birds? Discover the answers to these and other questions about our feathered friends and arboreal neighbors. We’ll also create our own GRC herbarium specimens, make urban bird nests, and chart which birds frequent our camp bird feeder. Be prepared to spend some time outside every morning and find out how we all can support the trees and birds in our sub/urban environment and why it is important to us humans to make sure that the birds and the trees survive and thrive.

Entering Grades 4-5

Work through engineering design challenges inspired by a broad range of literature! In this high-touch, hands-on camp you’ll read texts and identify problems that characters face. Brainstorm solutions based on the character’s needs and constraints of the text. Then work with your team to design and build realistic solutions for the characters to use. But you’re not finished! Test your solution, then refine it to make it even better! Collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking are key elements. Problem solve with your favorite characters in this “novel” summer camp! Did you take this last summer? Come on back—we’ll have new stories and some new materials to work with. (Novel Engineering is an approach originally developed by Tufts University to teach students the engineering process and link it to problems to fix, all through engaging literature.)

Entering Grades 2-9

If all goes well, by the time summer camp rolls around Artemis II will have launched and returned! But what happens when things don’t go as planned? NASA, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and every other space-related organization spend a lot of time problem solving! Issues happen before launches, during launches and while rockets are in space. How do scientists resolve issues given practical constraints – like weight, budgets, available tools, and more? What about ongoing problems we need to solve, like the issue of space junk? Try your hand at using the engineering design method to create solutions to some of our space-related problems. We’ll also tackle challenges with LEGO robotics projects and building/launching model rockets.

(Students will be divided into smaller groups by grade, and curriculum adjusted accordingly. Advanced Space Academy will be for grades 7 – 9.)

Entering Grades 4-9

Giagantic stone heads, were-jaguars, massive pyramids, calendar coding, advanced astronomy, Parkour, secret tunnels, human sacrifice, and CHOCOLATE! Just a few of the incredible mysteries we’ll investigate as we dig into the early Mesoamerican cultures of the Olmecs, Teotihuacans, and Mayans. The battle game will return with some new twists. Join us as we discover the “City of the Gods,” build model temples, create gold and silver masks, and feast on the culinary delights of our Central American ancestors!

Entering Grades 5-9

WANTED: Book lovers. Creative writers. Dig deep into your imagination and experiences to create stories. Learn how to plan out your writing, and develop your characters. Learn about different kinds of poetry and read and create a variety of poems. Participate in a poetry slam to celebrate each camper’s writing. Learn about the importance of a writing community and supporting each other to produce the best writing you can. Share your favorite reading with book talks (and hear from camp adults as well)! Put your imagination in print!

*This camp is not intended to teach students to improve their writing mechanics but to foster a love of reading, writing, and collaborating! Students WILL receive feedback on their writing; however, the feedback will be more centered on ensuring the story makes sense, rather than the mechanics of the writing.

Entering Grade 1

Plunge into the mysteries of the ocean. Meet sea animals, large and small, friendly and dangerous. How do their babies live? Make edible aquariums. How is a coral reef like a giant apartment building? Clean up a mini oil spill and find out how we can protect the ocean. Then explore the sun, moon, planets and stars! Create a replica of the surface of the moon. Look at its sea, volcanoes and Apollo landings, and build your own miniature ‘moon rover.’ How far can you jump on the moon? Calculate your weight on other planets. Harness the energy of the sun in your solar oven to roast toasty marshmallows.

Entering Grades 2-3

Stories & Structures! Dialogue & Design! Plans & Plots! Like to read? Like to build? In this high-touch, hands-on camp you’ll read a broad range of texts and identify problems that characters face. You’ll brainstorm solutions based on the character’s needs and constraints of the text. Then work with your team to design and build realistic solutions for the characters to use. But you’re not finished! Test your solution, then refine it to make it even better! Collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking are key elements. Problem solve with your favorite characters in this “novel” summer camp! Did you take this last summer? Come on back—we’ll have new stories and some new materials to work with. (Novel Engineering is an approach originally developed by Tufts University to teach students the engineering process and link it to problems to fix, all through engaging literature.)

Entering Grades 2-4

Happy Semiquincentennial, America! Let’s celebrate our 250th by traveling back to early America—but be prepared! It’s a tough life, no matter who you are. Chores, walking to school—day-to-day life was a LOT of work. Make your own haversack, practice writing lessons with a quill, and enjoy colonial games with your friends. Become an apprentice to a local tinsmith, blacksmith or printer. Join the Culper Spy Ring and learn to decode messages. Explore the identities of people who are often overlooked during this time period—what were their lives like? Then use democratic principles from the Declaration of Independence and Constitution to create your own system of laws. How would you change these to make them more equitable and inclusive? History has its eyes on you!

Entering Grades 4-5

We’ll cover the basics of stop motion animation techniques and then dive deeper into directing, storytelling, building, editing, and designing! There will be daily challenges to learn different techniques to incorporate into one final film complete with a full story, dialogue, and main characters. The grand finale will be a mini film festival to premiere everyone’s creations. If you were in the younger class last summer, come back and build on your skills, learn more advanced techniques, and create more complex movies! And if you weren’t, we’ll quickly get you caught up and making movies.

Entering Grades 2-9

We all know the main planets with their fun mnemonic – My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nachos – but what about. . . everything else? Space is so much more than just planets. What else makes up our universe? Let’s examine space dust and gases, black holes, exoplanets, comets, and all the types of stars. We’ll explore tools like the James T. Webb telescope and the amazing images it’s providing, and we’ll even cra ft our own telescopes! And of course, it wouldn’t be Space Academy without working in some LEGO robotics and building/launching model rockets! (Students will be divided into smaller groups by grade, and curriculum adjusted accordingly. Advanced Space Academy will be for grades 7 – 9.)

Entering Grades 4-9

Aqueducts and floating gardens, a mighty military, jewelry and metallurgy masters, advanced medical practices, and earthquake-resistant buildings — Aztecs? Incas? Or both? Which culture didn’t have a written language? Who played games of hipball and patolli? Join us as we navigate the highly complex canal and irrigation systems, one designed for the mountains and one for marshy lowlands. Help us decode ancient symbols, create Aztec and Inca-inspired art, learn about daily life, play ancient board games, and celebrate with a ritual feast!