Author - Channing Kaiser, Outdoor Education Director

My most vivid memories of childhood are playing in the woods behind my best friend’s house. We built lopsided tree forts and dug a huge pit that we dreamed would become a pond and penned notes on leaves, which we mailed by dropping them from the aforementioned tree forts. Summer meant mud and matted hair and the occasional poison ivy rash.

As reported by the Children & Nature Network, kids today spend less than 10 minutes per day playing outdoors. There are many factors for this–inaccessible greenspaces, parental fear, lack of comfort or familiarity with nature, a rapidly urbanizing world, etcetera—but the result regardless is that the average American child is increasingly disconnected from the natural world. 

In our outdoor education program here at Camp Ocean Pines, we serve roughly 2,000 participants annually. Some are students who regularly vacation abroad and have exposure to worldly wonders, and some are students who are seeing an ocean for the very first time. It is our privilege and our challenge to foster a connection between every student and the natural world. With that budding connection, we hope that kids continue to explore their curiosity for nature and increase their time spent outdoors once they leave here. Ideally, Camp is just one small but impactful moment in a lifetime of outdoor connection.

Our methodology looks something like this: 

First, we try to access their curiosity and attention through direct experience. From holding a starfish in our local tide pools to tasting native woodsorrel gathered from the surrounding forest, we offer students safe, guided experiences in the outdoors in hopes of igniting their curiosity for the world around them.

With that direct experience comes information delivery. Did you know that starfish poop and eat through the same orifice? Did you know that they push their stomachs through that orifice and surround their food with it and then suck their stomach and their food back in? We ask students what they know, what they notice, and what they wonder about the animals and environment in order to stoke their curiosity further while giving them new information to bolster their observations. If the direct experience is the spark that ignites their interest, the following knowledge is the kindling to keep it going.

Then comes creation. Many educators use Bloom’s Taxonomy when thinking about children’s cognitive skills in regard to a task, and creation is at the apex, the skill we should push all children to utilize. Memorizing information is one thing, but memorizing information and applying it in a different context is a whole other brain function. For us, we implement less-structured creation activities so that kids can synthesize the information they’ve learned with their own creativity. After experiencing and learning about tide pool invertebrates and their habitats, they get to create their own (a candy crab who lives in the splash zone and eats littered wrappers? Love it!). Play is an essential part of childhood, and we want to intertwine that as closely with nature and education as we can. This is the bonfire. The fusion of knowledge with wonder and creativity, all done together in community. 

For decades people have bemoaned the widening rift between children and their environment. My own suburban childhood summers sound almost fictitious to some of our kids. Even our well-traveled students sometimes lack a sense of familiarity with the outdoors—nature as a destination, not a home.

But as we observe a dearth of intimacy with nature, we are also witnessing a rapidly changing climate and a vanishing world. The pressure increases for young people to become planetary saviors.

To paraphrase the esteemed environmental educator David Sobel, we must let children love the Earth before we ask them to save it. And that is exactly what we aspire to do here at Camp Ocean Pines. Through experiential education, we hope that every child finds an animal, an idea, a green budding plant to love and to wonder about and to cherish. Love comes first, action comes after.

Our most valued feedback comes from our students. This one came from Daniel, a student who attended spring 2024, and it’s a testimonial that perfectly summarizes what we try to do here at Camp, the strides we try to make in better connecting kids with the natural world. He wrote to his naturalist, “Thank you for teaching me how to make a survival shelter. Before that I was always indoors, never knowing how to do anything in the wilderness, always thinking there is nothing to do outside. But you showed me something that changed my life forever. Now I always want to be outdoors. Thank you.”