It sounds like you're stuck in a rut that a lot of camps find themselves in, especially for those with campers and staff who return year after year. I have a couple of thoughts:
- To what you suggested about combining swim sessions, we do that sometimes. It's one of the easier activities to make bigger, and you can generally combine skill levels and do a "pool party" type thing. We also sometimes do this with court/field games activities. You can even combine oldest campers with youngest and have the oldest help instruct youngest. Sometimes, we do an "oldest cabin vs. counselors" meet/activity, and the kids really like that, but you need to be sure to include the younger campers in some way, too.
- Guest instructors. We've sometimes had people come in a teach a special activity or do a presentation of some sort. You could invite a yoga or dance or hula hoop or whatever kind of teacher in for a day to teach small group and/or whole camp activities.
- As to whole camp activities, try theme days every once in a while. Maybe you decide that every Wednesday will be a theme day, and you can either incorporate the theme into regular activities or do all-camp programming for all or most of the day. Examples include marshmallow olympics and jello olympics, days that celebrate a certain person or historical figure (Paul Bunyan day), cultural celebration (each group represents a country, religion, time period, etc.), a "field day" between teams or age groups, etc. Also, encourage your staff to be thinking up activities throughout the year. They're probably seeing a lot of really great ideas at college or wherever else they are, and just need a little bit of encouragement to take some initiative and see how to implement those or similar ideas at camp.
