It was a Thursday afternoon, just after lunch, but the 6th-grade students in teacher Jodi Ancel’s class weren’t fidgeting and they weren’t sleepy.
They were blindfolded, standing around in the sunshine on a grassy field at the Hoover Outdoor Education Center, just west of Yorkville, and they liked it. As Mike Stefanski, 12, one of the blindfolded, put it: “At school all you do is sit around and just do work. This is funner than at school.”
And if Alan Kromanaker, director of Hoover, has his way, students from the southwest suburbs and other parts of the metropolitan area will be sharing in the fun. The camp, which is owned and operated by the Boy Scouts of America, three years ago opened to other groups.
The Hoover Center offers six overnight lodges (some with fireplaces and all with kitchens and bathrooms), a dining hall, an Olympic-sized pool, pavilions and picnic areas, and a meeting building with four small classrooms and an activity room. There also are 17 tent camping areas that include flush toilets and running water.
And there is always the Fox River for fishing and canoeing.
Ancel’s group, part of 101 6th graders from Plainfield’s Grand Prairie Elementary School, was getting ready for a lesson on team building. Designed to promote teamwork and cooperation, the lesson involved students walking around blindfolded, depending on a partner to guide them safely through any obstacles.
In addition to the challenges the students faced in the team building program, they tried their hand at archery, outdoor cooking, bubbleology (making big bubbles) and studied worms and pioneer life, took nature walks, went swimming in the pool and sat around bonfires during their 2 1/2-day stay at the 406-acre outdoor center on the Fox River.
This was the first time Grand Prairie had sponsored a campout field trip at Hoover, and Ancel said that when it was first proposed she wasn’t even sure she wanted to participate.
“But I’m having a wonderful time,” she exclaimed. “The most outstanding thing I have experienced here is that the students who don’t do well in school really are excelling, becoming leaders here. They’re given an opportunity to do things in a way they don’t think is academic. I see a different side of them, and they see a different side of me.”
Grand Prairie’s principal, John Harper, one of 25 parents and teachers who accompanied the students, was out at a pavilion where students tried their hand at tinsmithing by making a pattern of punched holes in tin cans as part of the pioneer living class. Like Ancel, Harper was seeing a different side to his students, and he liked what he saw.
“Children don’t always have a chance to glow in the traditional environment,” he explained. “Here they glow. They have an opportunity to apply some of the things they’ve learned in the classroom to a real-life environment and they’ve had an opportunity to interact with teachers, their principal and parents in that environment. It allows everybody to see everybody else in a different perspective. Learning is important, but what goes on behind the scenes is even more important.”
Harper said the camping trip took almost a year to plan, but the time spent at Hoover was even better than he had hoped.
“The weather’s cooperated,” he said. “The kids have been fantastic, and the parents and volunteers have helped in every way possible. A lot of creativity and a lot of hard work on the part of our teachers allow a program like this to work. It’s going so smoothly because of the dedication of teachers and parents.”
One of these dedicated people, Denise Tady, teaches reading and English at Grand Prairie, but this afternoon she was showing her students how to make big bubbles using a piece of yarn with its ends tied together and soaked in water and dish washing soap. This class on bubbleology had been one of the favorites at the campout.
“This is for kids to have fun,” said Tady, laughing as an especially large bubble floats toward a student and hits him in the back. “That’s what school is about. They can look at the bubble and learn about geometry, about shape and reflection and have fun. The kids are excited about coming out here. They are doing academics, but they’re not so regimented. It doesn’t seem like school.”
For people who want to know the secret of making fantastic bubbles, Tady recommends making bubbles on a day with high humidity.
“It gives more color to the bubbles,” she confided.
Jennie Meyer and Meggie Pieper, both 12, demonstrated their technique for making the biggest bubbles. “The bigger the bubbles the better,” said Meggie, as she and Jennie dipped their pink yarn in a tub of soap. “I’m going to do this at home!”
As president of the Grand Prairie School’s Parent-Teacher Organization, Sally DeLaRosa was in on all the planning that went into making the campout possible, including a trip to view the Hoover Center two weeks before the actual outing. She also volunteered to be a parent helper during the campout, which her son Raul also attended.
“We decided parents and their kids would be in different groups,” she said, explaining why she was helping out the Pioneer Life teacher while her son was off on a nature hike. “We broke these kids up in different groups. We split them up good. It’s fun for the kids to be in a different environment, not with the same kids as they are with in school.”
She said she thought the trip was exciting and wished the school had sponsored such an outing before.
“The No. 1 thing these kids are learning is how to get along outside the classroom, how to be responsible for themselves,” she said.
A 2 1/2-day trip like the one Grand Prairie students enjoyed runs about $60 per person, said Kromanaker, director of the center. (The Grand Prairie PTO paid for a portion of the cost, and students paid the rest through a candy sale they held.) That includes some programming, cabins and food. He said most school groups bring about 70 people. For Scouts, tent camping and one hour of pool time runs $100 per troop for a weekend. If the Scouts prefer to sack out in cabins, which sleep 24, a weekend will run $160. And for churches or special recreation groups, a 24-person cabin, one hour of pool time and all meals would run $975 for a weekend. Groups that use the center also are required to show proof of an insurance rider for $1 million liability coverage.
Boy Scout Troop 65 from Lockport camped for no charge last summer, working off the fee under the Friends of Hoover program. Steve Oostema, assistant scoutmaster of Troop 65, said the work (installing shelves in a storage area) was worth it.
“We really liked Hoover. It was one of the better places we stayed close to our area,” he said. “They are real close to Yorkville, and you can canoe the lower Fox River. I thought that was a great feature.”
Grand Prairie parent volunteers Judy Davis and Kathy Sharkey liked the fact that the kids were given strict rules to follow, including that they could not bring makeup, hair curlers or fancy clothes with them.
“So all the kids are pretty much equal,” said Davis. “Everyone lets their guard down. I think they should do this in a younger grade; it forces you to get acquainted.”
“You’re thrown together and it works,” agreed Sharkey. “I helped out with the team building yesterday and I liked what it taught. You come in with a group of 12 people and if they liked them or not they had to work with them. You don’t get that in a classroom. Classroom work is pretty much individual work.”
Davis found the worm study interesting.
“I went into it thinking, `What’s there to learn about a worm,’ but a worm has a lot of parts! For instance, a worm has five double hearts, and if you cut a worm in half, the part with the head will still live. And a worm is both a boy and a girl. I learned a lot.”
The worm study and bubbleology and all the other classes offered students on this outing were run by Grand Prairie School’s own staff. Principal Harper said he wanted this positive interaction between his teachers and students, but for schools and other groups who might need more assistance, the Hoover Education Center is able to offer both a variety of programs and an on-site staff, Kromanaker said.
“This group opted to do its own programs, but we can do them or we can offer a combination,” Kromanaker said. “Most schools do bring parent leadership, and most schools do stay overnight for one or two nights. I hire part-time seasonal program staff as needed. There’s a part-time aquatic director and a full-time ranger staff.
“Our primary mission for school groups doing outdoor education is to teach them out of doors what they’ve been learning in the classrooms,” Kromanaker said. “Experiencing it first-hand helps sink in what is learned in the classroom.”
Offering these types of programs to the schools is something fairly new at the Hoover Center.
“But we’re growing every year,” Kromanaker said. “Our rates are very reasonable, and I like to think our reputation is good. The best advertising is by word of mouth.”
Schools have brought students to Yorkville from all around the suburban area, Kromanaker said, and from the Chicago public schools, too.
“Last year some kids came out here from Chicago,” Kromanaker remembered. “We had one of our fields planted in corn and we showed it to them, and some of them wouldn’t believe that was corn. They had only seen corn as a kernel from a can. They had never seen corn grow. That’s what this place is for.”
But schools are not the only groups that can use the facility, Kromanaker added.
“We offer programs to anybody interested in learning about the outdoors, church groups, civic groups, even family reunions. In the summer the Easter Seals, Multiple Sclerosis Society and Muscular Dystrophy Society all offer week-long camping programs. We are handicapped accessible, with asphalt paths around the camp. The Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts have a resident camp here all summer long. From the first of April until the middle of October, we are very busy.”
In addition to the camping program, the center offers an aquatic program that includes swimming lessons, water exercise classes, CPR and first aid, and lifeguard courses September through May.
“I would like to encourage the schools to use our pool for swimming meets,” Kromanaker said. “We don’t have a diving area, but the pool is here.” He said it rents for $60 an hour.
“We’re absolutely coming back here next year,” Principal Harper said. “Ideally I would like every child who goes through our building to experience this. There are a lot of wonderful things that take place in a situation like this.”
He cited the nature sensing walk, a silent half-mile hike that students took from a pavilion to the river, as one of those things.
“We’ve had six groups go through and not a single child broke that silence,” he said, his voice filled with awe.
That many quiet 6th graders, intent on looking at mushrooms, frogs, green snakes, snails and maybe, just maybe, a deer is pretty impressive. Why would that many children want to hold their tongues?
“We had to be quiet if we wanted to see the animals.” explained Colleen Glaser 12.
Giving the kids a chance to see the animals, the trees and maybe even a deer is what the Hoover Outdoor Education Center is all about. Hopefully, said Harper, this is a memory they will keep.
