Wrapping up the Summer

This morning I slept in past sunrise and savored the knowledge that I am done with the 10 mile bike commute that has dominated my summer mornings for the last two months. When we did eventually roll out of bed, Chris and I sat on the front porch eating pancakes made with salalberries, blackberries, dock seed flour, homemade kefir, and eggs from our own feathered ladies. We felt like good little homesteaders.

Now the day has turned hot and windy, and I've managed to spend all morning and most of the afternoon doing life laundry: catching up on emails and phone calls, cleaning the house and buying groceries now that this month's food stamps have finally rolled around. My final piece of catch-up work, though, is to back up and tell the story of this summer.

Yesterday was my last day working at TrackersPDX as an environmental education apprentice. I assisted with the summer day camp program, teaching homesteading and wilderness survival skills to kids ages 5-14. It was intense to work full-time outdoors with kids; considering the long bike trip there and back, and with my gardening job thrown in the mix, I can fairly say I spent almost every daylight hour of the summer outside. I've never felt so strong, so stiff, or so sunbaked for so long. It feels great.

I need to reflect in some way, so I'll start with a list of what I learned:

• to make blackberry vine cordage, ivy baskets, a bamboo bow, dock seed flour, yarn netting and finger crochet, plaster casts of animal tracks, coat-hanger/loofa critter-catching nets, and bamboo bullfrog spears
• to adapt my storytelling to variously themed camps, changing the characters to be Forest Ninjas, Oregon Trail settlers, or Safari Trackers. And to find songs to match different camps (bullfrog and crawdad songs were awesome for Wild Safari and Wilderness Survival camps; Appalachian mining songs turned out to be good dwarfish music for Middle Earth Camp)
• a lot of good games to keep kids busy during transition times
• to use mud, ash or even blackberry juice ridiculously smeared on kids' faces as "camouflage"

This summer I had the opportunity to work with some incredibly talented instructors, each with their own very unique style, and each with different strengths that inspired me. Some had incredible storytelling ability, and were able to weave the week's experience into a narrative that held the children captive in its spell. Others were simply awe-inspiring in their knowledge of their subject -- there are a couple of awesome wilderness gurus at Trackers. And others were experts in crowd management, a skill you never truly appreciate until you're teaching six-year-olds to carve with knives or throw ninja stars.

There were also a couple of instructors who challenged me, and a couple of weeks that seemed to stretch forever. I thought a lot about what made these weeks more challenging; partly there were some groups of kids that were particularly difficult to coordinate. I discovered that while I love working with young children one-on-one, I enjoy working with older groups of children in the context of outdoor education. Five- and six-year olds are too spacey and in their own worlds, so you end up spending a lot of time just focusing and herding them. There was one instructor I worked with who did this with exceptional talent and grace, and I would love to get there one of these days, but for now I really savor working with older groups kids who can learn more complex skills.

I spent a lot of time finding the balance between being fun and goofing around with kids, and being assertive about safety. Once you establish a good rapport with a group, a good stern face is so important! It isn't about discipline necessarily, but about good communication -- the kids have to know what's a joke and what's serious.

I'm excited to do the weekend immersion program now and learn a more in-depth, adult version of what we've been teaching. Meanwhile, I want to always be thinking about how I would teach those skills in a way that would be accessible and fun for kids . . . if I do this again next year I will have a full set of tools to make it an even more awesome summer. For now, I'm kind of excited to go back to part-time nanny work during the weeks, and have some more time for the pumpkin house farm and other projects.