Photo by Ross Lavigne - A group of children get ready to take a tour at the I-XL Plant Friday afternoon as part of the Medalta summer programming for kids.

By Alex McCuaig

Kids Camp

Kids summer camps in the Hat

Jul 19, 2019 | 4:57 PM

As the second half of the summer comes up, it’s not too late to get kids into activities as Medalta and SALTA Gymnastics are offering up ceramics to gymnastics camps.

The 2010 floods may have knocked out the I-XL brick factory but the century-old factory has been slowly transformed into use for educational programming at Medalta – including for kids.

“We have access to this great Historic Clay District so we do nature walks along our trails quite often,” said Wendy Struck, Medalta educational coordinator, about the children’s programming. “We do walks to different parks in the area and go to Plainsman (Clay) to check that out.”

While the activities are varied, all programs have no shortage of opportunities to create art from clay.

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Struck says while their programming runs through August, it’s not too late to sign up for next week’s Western-themed “Howdy Partner,” children’s programming for five to nine year olds.

If the kids are bouncing off the walls, SALTA Gymnastics will train them to vault, flip and trampoline their way through the rest of the summer.

For the last 31 years, the city’s gymnastics club has been training local, provincial and even national award winning gymnasts.

“For the summer camps, they learn from beam, bars and floor mostly. Vault as well – we focus on those,” said gymnastics coach Amyliah Carswell. “We do gymnastics classes in the camps twice a day and we do some other things in between like games and crafts and all that sort of stuff.”

It’s also an opportunity to springboard into the gymnastic’s facility’s regular fall and winter programming.

“It would be a good way to start I believe because they’ll be doing stuff all day and it would be good for them to get out of the house,” said Carswell. “They don’t just stick around the gym the whole time but they start to learn some skills here and it’s still a lot of fun.”