Conneaut fifth grade teachers recently recreated a camp day experience for their students. They wanted to provide opportunities and activities that the students missed out due to the pandemic this past year.
The classes that students participated in were archery, construction zone, tie dye t-shirts, and Oh Deer.
The Wood County Park District provided the archery equipment along with naturalist Craig Spicer, who taught the students all of the safety procedures to follow along with proper shooting techniques. There were 10 targets set up and students were able to shoot two rounds with five arrows in each round. This was always a favorite class at camp and the teachers wanted the current fifth graders to also experience it.
The Construction Zone class develops teamwork and cooperation skills by having teams of students build structures through friendly competition. This class emphasized positive communication as teams had to overcome obstacles as challenges were presented by instructor, Paul Reinhart. Each team had an architect, foreman, and builders, in which the architect was provided a picture of a structure to describe to the foreman, who then in turn relayed that information to the builders.
Tie Dye class is always a favorite of students at camp. Kelsey Frysinger, art teacher at Conneaut, provided students the opportunity to design their own t-shirts. She had designs for them to choose from, bullseye or spiral, along with various colors of dye to use. She also had pre taught students about the color wheel and corresponding colors related to primary and secondary colors that would complement each other as they applied the colors to their t-shirts.
Former Conneaut teacher, Jeff Johnston, returned to teach an ecosystem class, “Oh Deer.” “Oh Deer” is a simulation game where students become “deer” and components of habitat. This activity emphasized the most essential things that animals need in order to survive. This game demonstrated how animal populations increase and decrease from year to year and that limiting factors are the cause of the population change.
Conneaut PTO provided Jimmy Johns lunch for the students along with a s’more dessert from Sweet Treats in Bowling Green.
In the afternoon students learned several repeat after me songs, skits that each class learned in order to perform for their classmates, along with several teacher-led skits.
Although they didn’t actually go to camp, the teachers wanted students to experience the highlights from camp.