Summer brings much downtime for children in Mexico.

Sure, there is summer school, but that doesn’t last the whole summer.

The Mexico Area Family YMCA hosts camps each summer for two groups of children: kindergarten through second grade and third through fifth grade. Each camp has a theme or come collection of sports such as bike, rookie all sports, outdoors, rookie basketball, esports, all sports, rookie soccer and golf.

Caleb Floyd is the youth sports director at the YMCA in his second summer running the camps. He relies on his counselors to work with the children and make sure children have fun with their peers.

“Our main goal for camp is get kiddos moving, being active and having fun,” Floyd said. “Beyond that, we strive to improve social skills, either sports or more traditional summer camp activities.”

The traditional sports the YMCA covers at its rookie all sports camp, for example, includes baseball along with basketball, football, soccer and field hockey. The kindergarten through second graders July 8 on the final day of the rookie all sports camp playing T-ball, learning “beginner concepts, learning rules, fundamentals” according to the website.

The children took turns at the plate and in the field, but on about every batter, they were off to the races. It seemed to morph into a game of tag between the batter and the fielder as the smiles on their faces grew as the separation between them shrank.

On July 13, a group of third through fifth graders made the trek to Reading Farms to set their sights on an archery session during outdoors camp. A couple of experts were available on the range as the children grabbed arrows, loaded them in the bow, and pulled and release to fire at lined-up targets.

Occasionally, one of the experts stepped in to give instruction and would stress safety in every moment, including ensuring everyone was done shooting before all of the children retrieved their arrows.

“While most of our time will be spent learning or playing the sport at hand,” according to the website. “We will be using some of our time on topics such as social skills, healthy eating, exercise habits, etc.”

For the rest of the YMCA’s summer sports camp schedule, it is hosting rookie basketball camp this week for kindergartners through second graders and then will hold an esports camp for kindergartners through fifth graders July 18-22. Campers do not bring their own equipment for the esports camp, where they will play various titles while learning about concepts such as teamwork, communication and healthy gaming habits.

In the weeks following that, there will be the outdoors camp for kindergartners through second graders July 25-29, the all sports camp for third through fifth graders Aug. 1-5, and the rookie soccer camp for kindergartners through second graders and golf camp for third through fifth graders Aug. 8-12.