Working our weekend groups at my camp is an optional and extra thing. Fall we didn't really have much need for extra staff to host weekend groups but I don't know about spring. We have some weekend things that are volunteer as well (mom and dad youth overnights, etc).
My camp's OE groups usually come up as a whole grade so there's 60-90 kids ina group. Ours too are mostly 5th and 6th grade. Sometimes we have groups up for a day field trip.
We have groups Monday to wednesday afternoon and wednesday morning to Friday afternoon too. For the most part it really works perfectly well. The first group is out of the cabins by breakfast and are in the dining hall eating lunch while the new group moves into the cabins and eats a sack lunch they brought from home in the meadow.Then the old group leaves and it's all normal.
We work from 7:30 til about 9:30 but also don't have kids to care for at night. During the day we teach activities such as forest, wildlife, wetlands ecology, outdoor living skills, orienteering, canoeing, climbing wall, team building actvities, and Life and Death in the Forest, and possibly something else. On the first night there are night hikes and on the second night, a campfire.
Last fall we had 6 staff, plus our director. It varies depending on the season and how many she manages to hire, but that's a noraml amount of staff. Yeah, sometiems we have big groups and need to call in people from previous seasons for the group. That's how I get to work one session this spring! In fact, last fall we accidentally double booked groups so we had to call in like 4 more people for that and one to be our KA (he volunteered himself for single-handedly being our KA for like 150 people though we helped when we could). Every session one of us is the KA and we rotate through it.
