This Way To The S'Mores!
On April 2nd, the buses will be loaded with students, staff and stuff as grades 6 –12 head up to spend the week at Pocahontas State Park near Richmond, Virginia. They’ll spend four nights and five days together, exploring the sites in and around camp.
Organizers Jennifer Garrish and Leslie Cole (who teach high school science and social studies, respectively) have planned an array of activities for the kids including campfires with s’mores and a trip to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
“It’s going to be so much fun,” said senior Virginia Downes, whose work on the yearbook was interrupted by these interviews.
Jennifer and Leslie plan the week with all the academic subjects in mind, and with the goal of balancing scheduled activities with fun down-time.
“The athletic component is being outside,” Jennifer said. “Coach B will be bringing outdoor games like cornhole and horseshoes, and we can hike around the forest areas. For math, the camp provides geocaching. The kids will be journaling for their Language Arts classes.”
The campers will go to the Science Museum in Richmond and to the IMAX theater for a film about dolphins (how appropriate!) They’ll spend one whole day visiting Monticello, which is an education unto itself. The lessons on Civil War medicine at the Museum of the Confederacy sound intriguingly gruesome.
Included in the camp curriculum is the all-important subject of Getting Along Well With Others, also known as Cooperation. There are roughly 80 people going, counting students, staff and chaperones. They are divided up into multi-age groups (one or two kids from each grade in each group, more or less) with two adult supervisors. These groups are assigned meals for which they are responsible.
“Each group will plan, prepare, serve and clean-up their assigned meals,” said Jennifer.
They’ve already met with their groups to plan what they want to serve. (I’ve overheard discussion about some of the possible menu items; sausage wrapped in bacon has been hotly debated.)
“At camp, a lot of people who don’t normally have anything to do with each other get to interact,” Jennifer said.
This will be the fifth time that Ocracoke School has camped together.
Jennifer and Leslie give credit to former Ocracoke resident Maryann Zbel for this great idea – she started it when she was Ocracoke’s librarian. The first school camping trip was in 1999, to Singletary Lake State Park in Bladen County. Everyone in grades 3 – 12 went on that first trip, and the teachers held classes at the camp, with few off-campus trips. It was, they agreed, a great success and fun for everyone.
“Some of the kids were begging to stay another week,” said Leslie.
A few years later, Jennifer had her own children in school and she wanted them to have the school camp experience, so she starting planning trip 2.
“Our second trip was to Camp Pisgah just south of Asheville,” she said. “We chose Pisgah because we realized so many, many kids had never seen the mountains.”
“It was a huge undertaking to go to Pisgah,” Leslie said. “We took 3rd through 12th grade again, and had an overnight on the way there in Winston-Salem. We did a lot of activities and hands-on experiences in the mountains. We left the site instead of having classes at camp, and really, we’ve never gone back.”
After a five-year hiatus, a new principal, and a new school superintendent, Leslie and Jennifer decided to re-think the camping trip and re-present it to the school board. Now, a biennial school camping trip for 6th-12th grade is included in the school improvement plan. And they delegate the planning more, getting some much-appreciated help from middle school teachers Lynn King and Gwen Austin.
In the fall of 2007, Ocracoke School went to Camp New Hope near Chapel Hill, and in 2009, they went back to Camp Singletary. Both times the teachers planned many off-campus trips to museums and exhibits, and adventures such as a corn maze, a climbing wall, and the Dean Smith Center at UNC.
This year they’re heading across the border to Virginia.
“We wanted to go to another mountain area,” Jennifer said. “This will be a different landscape and it’s closer than the North Carolina mountains.”
“The kids are more traveled now,” Leslie said. “So the trip is not as much about a need for exposure. But the kids do get excited about it, and they actually get more out of the trip as they get older.”
Jennifer agreed. “They appreciate it more,” she said.
“It’s kind of sad that this is my last trip,” Virginia said.
She’s been on three others; New Hope in 8th grade, Singletary in 10th grade and the high school trip to Washington, D.C. (which Leslie does every four years) in 9th grade.
“It’s a good way for everyone to be in an environment where we have a good time and we have to get along in spite of our differences,” Virginia said. “It’s fun and it’s very rewarding."
“And that’s why we do it,” Leslie said. “Hearing that makes it worth every second.”
What price could you put on that? The Ocracoke School camping trip is $60 per student; if you are the lucky parent of more than one adolescent, then your second (third, fourth…) child goes for $50. No child gets left behind for lack of sixty bucks.
“If there are financial needs, we can help,” Leslie said.
The camping trip is supported by PTA donations, a portion of the Booster Club’s t-shirt sales, and other fundraisers. Jennifer and Leslie choose camps that are economical and supply what’s needed for a large group. They’ve found, through experience, that state parks are the most group-friendly.
