Oasis Day Camp in Central Park — Local services in New York

Oasis Central Park truly provides an "oasis" for NYC kids in the summer by allowing kids to able to spend their summer days playing in Central Park!

You drop off your kids at a local school near 96th street and Central Park West in the morning, the kids spend their day in Central Park and then they return to the school in the late afternoon for pickup. The kids go swimming (instructional and free swim) approximately 3 days a week at Lasker Pool in the park. The rest of the day they spend doing a variety of activities in Central Park including sports, creative and performing arts and other activities. Plus, the older kids go on a field trip once a week to local attractions like the zoo, aquarium or local museums and science centers. Plus they have talent shows, color wars and other camp-wide events each week. Never a dull moment!

My daughter is now in the Teen Travel program (kids entering 7th grade and up). They go someplace different every day (beach, Great Adventure, museums, water parks, Broadway shows), and they do two overnight trips every summer. She loves the variety

My daughter (13) and my son (10) have both been going to Oasis in Central Park ("OCP") since they were each 5 years old for a combined 14 years and they keep wanting to go back year after year. As much as they love all of the activities, what they really love (and what my wife and I love) are the people. My kids almost always love their counselors and division leaders (each age group is a division, with kids broken down into smaller groups within each division, usually by age..younger to older). Everybody is kind, enthusiastic and caring, and most importantly, responsible. Every year my kids can't wait for the end of school so they can reunite with their favorite counselours and their camp friends.

So, if you want your kids to have a truly unique and fun summer experience, don't hesitate to send them to Oasis...

This camp was not the worst thing that could have happened to my child. She didn't totally hate it. But the gap between the expectations we were given initially & the reality of what she experienced was large and not in a pleasant way.

The camp director rarely responded to email. But at least the division leader was responsive, although she had limited ability to fix problems.

One week they somehow didn't realize how many kids they had & didn't order enough food so all the kids were hungry. Even on a good day the food was never quite enough. But they gave out cookies every single day, which the kids liked.

They took the kids to the park almost every day, which was the best part. But the counsellors are inexperienced & often weren't paying attention while some kids emotionally bullied other kids. I guess it's not a problem as long as your kid isn't being bullied though.

They did take the kids to the pool twice a week, which was nice. It wasn't the pool they told us they'd go to & they only had half an hour there but at least they got to go.

The worst part was that they oversold the experience heavily. We got a calendar filled with amazing events every day. Roughly one of these actually happened on any given week. The other days were just unstructured downtime. Towards the end of the summer our kid started taking a book with her to read. She could have done that at...

I second Ari B's review. I am writing about the ESIC (ages 3-5) group of the camp only, I don't have experience with the older groups. My 4 year old daughter and 3 of her friends attended this camp last month. 2 out of the 4 kids dropped out because they disliked it so much. While my daughter finished her 3 weeks there, she absolutely did not like it. Most of the advertised activities were not done with her class. She said it was mostly free play all day and she was really bored. They did not go to the sprinklers in the park as advertised, they did not play organized sports. Also, my daughter fell into the deep side of the pool while doing a climbing activity and got really scared! I emailed the camp director but got no response. They did not even once have the advertised lunch substitution of turkey sandwiches so I ended up having to send my daughter with lunch everyday in case she didn't like the camp lunch. Before that all she was eating the whole day were her snacks (sent from home). The camp is extremely disorganized at drop off and pick up. The young camp counselors seem to be trying their best (hence the two stars) but they are teens - there should be better structure and organization from the camp management. My daughter's summation of this place: "Mommy, I want to throw camp Oasis in the garbage". So we won't...