St. Louis Camp Fairs Help Families Plan Summer Fun

Finding the right summer camps for your kids is something most parents take as the first step to planning their summer.

Family vacations often come in second after scheduling several weeks or the entire summer full of camp experiences for the kids. And the St. Louis area offers an incredibly wide variety of camps to choose from. Kids can play sports, stay at the lake, focus on favorite art hobbies, hone their academic skills, explore new frontiers in science and robotics, learn how astronauts live and work in space, scuba dive, create artistic masterpieces and lots more.

Camp fairs – events where you can meet camp representatives and talk to them in person about the type of camps you're looking for – are a popular way for St. Louis parents to begin the camp selection process. (Camp guides, like stlcamps.com (part of stlparent.com) are a great way to choose the right camps as well.)

The St. Louis market is one of the largest for summer camps, and is shows. Our city is host to one of the largest camp fairs in the country, the Summer Opportunities Fair.

The 2016 St. Louis Summer Opportunities Fair is an opportunity for parents to learn about day camp and sleep-away camp opportunities for their children from preschoolers to teenagers, and will be held on Saturday, Jan. 30, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at John Burroughs School. The fair is free and open to all.

Summer camps from across the country and the globe are typically represented, and many St. Louis camps have representatives on hand as well. More than 160 camps will be represented. This fair is typically the largest in the St. Louis area, and serves to kick off the camp fair "season." If you're looking for camps that offer experiences abroad, this fair typically has the largest selection of those on hand.

The annual fair is sponsored by John Burroughs School, MICDS, and Whitfield School, and the location of the fair rotates among the three schools each year. 

The Summer Expo is the next camp fair you'll want to attend, and it's set for Sunday, Feb. 21 at Parkway West High School on Clayton Road in Ballwin from 11 to 3 p.m. This well-organized and well-attended fair is open to parents and families from all school districts and admission is free. Nearly 100 camps will be represented this year. There will be live entertainment and lots of giveaways. The Summer Expo is organized by the Parkway-Rockwood Community Education. STL Camps is a media sponsor of the Summer Expo. 

The Webster Grove School District hosts its Family Enrichment and Summer Opportunities Fair on Wednesday, March 2 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. This free fair is open to families from all school districts, and features camps and summer learning opportunities from across the metro area. It's held at Hixson Middle School on Elm Avenue, just off of I-44.

Some parents are lucky enough to have the camp fairs come to them. Abra-Kid-Abra sponsors a series of corporate camp fairs during lunch hours at well-known corporations across the St. Louis metro area during February and March. Companies include Monsanto, Centene, Edward Jones, Unigroup, Ameren, the St. Louis County Government Center and others. (Camps interested in being represented at these fairs should contact Jeff Lefton at jlefton(at)abrakid.com.)