Every year the 4th grade class at Sacred Heart takes a 3-day camping trip to the Indiana Dunes. Although they sleep in cabins and have indoor plumbing including hot showers, this is still quite an adventure for some of the kids. Highlights of the trip include the solo night hike, the eight-hour day hike, running down the sand dunes, playing the "Salmon Run Game" at the lakeshore, and, of course, the campfire with silly songs and S'mores.
(Rachel is on the left in the cowboy hat.)
Everything they do from dawn until dusk for three days has an eco-lesson hidden in it somewhere, but they're having so much fun, they don't realize how much they're learning. They even look forward to kitchen duty and were sucessful in not having ANY food waste at meal time.
The last day of the trip, they met with a park Ranger. They split into groups and were each assigned a "dilemma" for which each group had to present a skit on how to solve the dilemma.
Some of the dilemmas were erosion and biochemical waste. Rachel's group had to solve the dilemma of what to do about the over-population of deer. They definitely walked away with the Emmy Award for "Deer or No Deer," a take-off of the popular (for reasons I do not understand) TV show "Deal or No Deal."
(A hunter and a frightened deer are on the left. Rachel is in the back holding one of the "suitcases.")
Just give Dakota and I a straight shooting rifle, plenty of ammo, and we will seriously deplete the Indiana deer population!
Awesome we loved frog in the bog too