A week in the life

Ever wonder what a week looks like for Trevor & I? Here's a snapshot from a recent 5-day Outdoor Education stint with some 6th graders from a San Diego-area school.

Step 1: With your fearless co-leader (In my case, this week it was Chris, or as we affectionately call her, "Grandpa"), develop a theme and overall plan for the week. Ours: The Hawk-Eyed Hippies, giving us an excuse to take slow hikes taking everything in, talk with a lot of "man"s and "peace"s, and give one another Hippie names based on beautiful natural things we love (Mine was Avocado; Chris's was Starlight. Kids in our group chose: Redwood, Stream, Peace and more.)

Step 2: Give the 8 kids-turned-hippies in our group a chance to rid a "river" of "toxic waste" by swinging across it on a rope.


Step 3: Each morning, go over the day's topic. Here, Ben & Laura are talking Adaptation and Habitat. Did you know that ground squirrels chew up the shed skin of rattlesnakes and spread it on their tail to fool their predators?


Step 4: Spend the week exploring those daily themes in-depth. Here, the Hawk-Eyed Hippies explore our very own on-site Habitat, a pond, full of wildly exciting frogs.


Step 5: Expose the children to our wild & crazy gardener, Ryan. Here, they're checking out the baby plants in the greenhouse, figuring out why our mountain environment needs one and learning how they might be able to use compost and grow seedlings of their very own. (Later, Ryan told all of them they don't need to go to college.)


Step 6: Continue the daily lessons. Beyond Habitat and Adaptation, the other themes cover Life Components - that'd be energy, water & the life cycle - and the Human's Role about how we, even when we're not being hippies, can make little improvements to the Earth. Here, the whole 6th grade races to sort litter into their proper categories - Trash, Recycling, Compost, Re-Use (Guess which crate winds up empty!)



Step 7: Later, the Hawk-Eyed Hippies become superheroes. They've all decided what kind of environmental superpower they'd like to have, and gotten their faces all painted to reflect it. Then, they hike back to camp (we have 256 acres - at this point, we were about 25 minutes away from central camp's Dining Hall), sharing their Superhero backstories. (Me? I was The Conserver, capable of using only 50% what normal human beings think they need.)


Step 8: Challenge the kids with dinner cooked over a campfire outside (Yikes! They have to help chop!). This night we had calzones, and they didn't turn out well at all. But the chimichangas - flour tortillas pan-fried with cinnamon sugar - those turned out juuuust fine. (During summer, cookouts are actually overnights, where the Outdoor challenge extends to sleeping outside, but we're still in too cool of weather to ask that of the city kids.)


Step 8: On the final morning, get up at 5:15AM and hike to the highest point on camp property with all 30 kids to watch the sunrise. This morning, there was fog - but it cleared up just as Trevor got to the part of his Sunrise Story (passed onto him by his brother Nathan) to reveal a beautiful sun.


So, there you have it: A week in the life of outdoor educators. We have three sessions left this spring, and I look forward to continuing to learn something new each hour of each one.