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Humans are pretty excellent engineers, but a lot of what we’ve learned started in nature! This week at SPREE camp, we uncovered the original tunnel builders, fliers and what animals have inspired humans in our engineering feats.
On Monday our theme was River Engineers. We began our camp week with a name game to get to learn our fellow engineers at camp for the week. By being able to work together, our engineering projects and experiments will be even better than they could be on their own. Appropriately for River Engineers, the name game we played was a fun game called “Beavers and Lodges”. Beavers are fantastic engineers of our river and create habitat for other animals to live and thrive. |
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We also had our first critter crawl on Monday. Critter crawl is an activity we do every day at camp and is the time where we get into the river and catch macroinvertebrates like crawdads. It is amazing all the animals we catch with just small nets and recycled tupperware!
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Tuesday’s theme was “the river as inspiration”. As it sounds, our beautiful landscape at SPREE camp can definitely inspire art creations. We started our day with critter crawl. While catching and observing crawdads, mayflies, and other macroinvertebrates, we also continued work on our collaborative macroinvertebrate art project. It is coming along nice!
Our second activity was a very special guest. A local artist, Kim Gagnon came to camp and instructed our campers with a “paint and sip” (water) style painting class right along our river! It was wonderful to see our campers put their personal, creative spins on their canvas as they were painting along to the instructions of our guest! |
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The theme of Wednesday was focused on creating art inspired by nature, not just our river. We started with several art projects that used nature as a medium and material. We created some yarn weaving templates from sticks. Using yarn, we weaved using these materials! In addition to using sticks as a medium, campers also created pounded leaf art using collected leaves and a hammer. It was fun to get some energy out in a creative way to make some cool looking art!
I bet you can guess what we did alongside critter crawl this day… our collective art project! Each day our giant macro was getting filled out with natural materials, and the shape of the macro really began! This art project is a great inspiration to find the same macros and others in our river. Sometimes you have to look closely for these macros, because they sometimes just look wiggly in their nets! |
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Thursday was field day at camp. We spent most of the day outside at Johnson Habitat Park and our theme was focused on public art. We didn’t just keep our eyes out for public art in the park, but we created some ourselves! Campers experimented with chalk bombs which created explosions of color along the trails in the park. They also yarn bombed the trees and fencing in the park by hanging colorful yarn creations around the park. Of course we ended the day with a Critter Crawl!
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Friday was our final fun Friday at SPREE camp this summer! Our theme was appropriate for the final day of camp, that art is meant to be shared! We created kindness rocks for campers to place around camp, or take back to their neighborhood to spread creative kindness. We also completed another collaborative project to leave at camp- a painted tree branch!
Our final critter crawl was so fun- We finished our giant macroinvertebrate project! It was also awesome to get into the river one last time with our campers to find and observe as many critters that we could in our South Platte River. Of course we ended the week with an art walk and graduation! We look forward to all our upcoming School Break Camps this fall at SPREE, and are pumped to be back next summer as we are planning to return to two full summer camp locations! SPREE hopes to see you and your family down at the river again soon! |
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These activities can teach these children to be patient and etc.. There’s a lot of things they can learn in real life on this acitivty.