Shannon and I pitched our idea to anyone who would listen! We talked to community members, parents, and administration. Thankfully, every person we talked to believed in our vision and wanted to find ways they could get involved. We were able to secure donations from a private business (Dodge City Dental) and Dodge City Community College, and our administration seached, scrounged, and scraped up funding to ensure our camp received the resources we needed to make it successful. We were also able to be resourceful and use recycled and repurposed materials whenever possible. It was overwhelming to witness the generosity of our community to help put this camp together and ensure we could offer the opportunity to students at no cost!
Together Shannon and I thought that it would be fun to offer the camp to fourth graders. We thought that was a pivotal age where students were still inspired and enthusiastic about school, but also had the mental capacity to understand some of the concepts we wanted to emphasize. The problem was we didn't know how to reach any fourth graders. Without defining any terms we decided to simply ask every fourth grade teacher in our district to nominate "one at risk student who they believed would benefit from this type of experience." To be honest, I was concerned about turning over the control of who was going to be invited to our camp. However, my concerns were immediately put to rest after the first day of camp. We had an unbelievable group of young boys and girls! They were brilliant, hard working, fun loving campers with overwhelmingly positive attitudes! I immediately fell in love with each of our campers and I'm excited to follow their progress as they work their way through our school system!
We structured our camp to last three hours per day for five days. We decided to give each day a theme and create challenges and projects based upon that theme. The themes we chose were Air and Space, Ecology, Chemistry, Energy, and Engineering. As much as we could, we tried to create challenges where our campers would need to design, build, test, re-design, re-build, and re-test until they had a product that satisfied the challenge. It was simply inspiring to watch their little brains spin and their little fingers put to work. Watching our campers at work really rejuvenated my outlook on the future of our planet. We have some really creative and brilliant students in our classrooms; unfortunately, they are not always given the opportunity to let it show. At our camp we tried to give them full permission to allow their brilliance to shine!
Almost every day we had a guest speaker from the community come and talk briefly with our campers. We wanted to show our campers that there are lots of career opportunities out there in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. The speakers talked to our campers about their education and the types of opportunities at their jobs. It was fun to listen to the questions our campers had for our speakers. In most cases, our speakers were able to spend the rest of the morning with our campers. They hopped right into the mix and took directions from our campers as they worked to complete their challenges. I was very grateful for their willingness to share their experiences with our young campers!
I have to give credit to my partner Shannon for thinking of the idea of having high school students volunteer to help with the camp. We both asked a few of our high school students if they would be interested in helping to run the camp, and thankfully we received positive responses. We had a total of eight student volunteers, and I would not hesitate to say they were the number one reason for the camp's huge success. We spent time mentoring our "teenagers" (as they would come to be known) about the challenges. We would also talk to them about Inquiry Based Learning and Project Based Learning. We asked them to encourage the campers to try and experiment with their ideas. We asked them not to direct the campers, but rather support the campers as they worked their way through the challenge. Our teenagers were wonderful! The campers LOVED working with the high school students!
The other afternoon I was at the city swimming pool with my son. As we were leaving, I heard a woman yelling, "Mr. Coffey! Mr. Coffey!" I turned around, and there was a grown woman chasing me! She said, "Mr. Coffey, I'm Julian's mom. I saw you and I just had to stop you so I could thank you. Julian LOVED your STEM Camp! Thank you so much for giving him that opportunity. Wednesday night Julian was down in the dumps and acting very sad. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he was sad because he only had two days left of camp. It was the highlight of his summer!" That is not the first experience I have had with parents going out of their way to thank me for inviting their kid to the STEM Camp. Although I appreciate their gratitude, I almost feel bad accepting it. I feel like I should be thanking them (and I do whenever I have these encounters). It was their willingness to arrange rides, change schedules, and commit to this camp that made it so successful. It was their children who took time from their summer, worked hard, and kept a smile on their face for three hours every day of the week! Because of them, I became a better teacher. I learned more in that week than any college course or professional development seminar could have ever taught me. I can't think of any other way I would like to spend a week of my summer! The entire experience was exponentially more amazing than any vision I had in April. I am eternally grateful to Shannon Ralph, Cindy Venard, Jennifer Miller, Amanda Coffey, our eight teenagers, each of our campers, their parents and family, my principal Jacque Feist, our school district, our donors, and all the other people in our community who helped bring this camp to life! I can't wait to see what the future holds! Thank you!!
Here is a highlight video of our experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUY94u67txM
Congrats to all of you! Do you think you can take donations from just regular people?
ReplyDeleteThanks Kara! Funding will be one of our obstacles next year. Ideally we'd like to partner with a corporation to help us financially, but I do think we would gladly accept donations from individuals!
DeleteThis is such an inspiring idea!
ReplyDeleteI don't have many good ideas, but this was a great one! What was inspiring was the creativity and intelligence those kids put on display! It was awesome!
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