Camping With Kids. Goldie Silverman
walk to a central spigot or pump in camp and carry water back to their campsite. If there is no central water supply, campers will pump and filter water from a lake or a stream and carry it back to camp.
Many campers deliberately choose to live for a few days with the barest minimum of essentials as a way of challenging themselves. In between those campers and those who go for the most luxurious of furnishings, there is a wide variety of opportunities. Campers in trailers, in pop-up tent-trailers with cloth side walls, and in outfitted vans have some of the amenities of the RV campers without the spaciousness. They also have some of the Spartan challenges of the tent campers.
How Can I Prepare My Family?
My friend Vicki has a lovely childhood memory of indoor camping. She had a “campfire” made of crumpled red and yellow tissue paper with a flashlight inside. She remembers eating lunch at her campfire, from a “mess kit” made from a recycled deli container filled with a sandwich, fruit, and snacks. Vicki probably thought this was a game, great fun, but her wise parents were actually preparing her for camping, learning to live in a tent. Preparing your family to camp is actually a learning experience, for you and for them. In this section, we will cover learning to live in a tent and in an RV; we’ll go over some ways to learn about nature, with special emphasis on two great programs, PEAK and Leave No Trace; and, finally, we’ll learn about campgrounds—they aren’t city parks.
Learning to Live in a Tent
A great way to prepare your kids—and yourself—for camping is to practice setting up your tent and letting your kids spend some time inside. You need to practice setting up your tent anyway; later, we’ll talk about near disasters that happened to people who tried to make camp when they didn’t know how to put the tent up.
If your tent is self-supporting, that is, if it doesn’t need to be pegged down, you can set it up in the family room or play room. Let your young children nap inside the tent. If your tent is set up outside, don’t just put it up and take it down, but leave it up for a while. Eat a meal outside next to or inside the tent. Perhaps you can even spend a night, or part of a night, sleeping outside.
IMAGINARY CAMPING
Camping at Home
Help your kids “experience” camping before you go by practicing camping at home. Make a tent by spreading a blanket over a low table or a chair tipped on its side. Let them spend time inside this smaller space, which will have the same feel as a tent.
Talking about the tent in advance and putting it up at home before your trip could avert a problem when night falls in camp. Many campers can tell you horror stories of being kept awake by a crying child two or even three campsites away from theirs. I can’t emphasize this enough: Practicing with the tent is a wise idea on two counts—you need to know how to do it, and young children need to feel that it’s a familiar space.
If you don’t have access to a tent, improvise. When my brothers and I were little, one of our favorite games was “covered wagon.” Every Saturday, we tipped our big rocking chair over and spread a blanket over the rockers. The room inside the blanket could just as easily been called a tent. If you don’t have a rocking chair, make your tent from a blanket and a card table or a low table or a tipped-over chair. Let your kids take a nap in their tent or take their favorite stuffed animals inside and tuck them in for a “nap.”
Learning to Live in an RV
If you’re planning to camp in an RV, you can also spend some days and even nights in it, if it’s parked at home. If you haven’t yet acquired the RV, whether you plan to rent or buy (more on this later), you can stop at an RV sales lot with your kids and walk through a few models.
If you’re driving somewhere where your route takes you past an RV sales lot, plan to leave an hour early to allow time to check out the RVs. Walk through the different models and show the kids where the bed is over the cab, if it’s that kind of arrangement, how the dinette folds down to make another bed, where the range and refrigerator are, where the toilet and the shower are located. Talk about who might sleep in each bed, and how you will eat breakfast after the dinette is folded into place again.
Don’t be shy about visiting RV lots more than once. Sales people in RV lots should welcome you as potential future customers.
Learning About Nature
At the same time you and your children are preparing to eat your meals and spend the night out of doors, you can be getting ready for the up-close-to-nature adventure of camping. Remember my definition of camping: spending the night up close to nature within a beautiful natural setting. Your goal is to make your children comfortable and curious in the out of doors.
You can begin to study nature in your own neighborhood. Start by taking “hikes” in your local park. Carry a magnifying glass for an up-close look at plants and insects. Older children can record their findings in a small notebook or tablet, or draw pictures with colored pencils. If you have a digital camera, let them use it to record what they see for their very own nature CD.
HELPING HANDS
Mini Museum
Your children will gain interest in nature and the things you might see on your camping trip if you help them start a “museum.” Encourage your children to pick up interesting specimens on your hikes and clear a shelf or table top to display these interesting finds at your home.
Take time to look at the plants that grow around you. Examine the way plants change in the course of just a few weeks, from bud to flower to seed. Find the stump of a tree that was cut and count the rings. How old was that tree when it was cut? Measure the tree’s circumference and diameter. (These are good words to teach your 9- and 10-year-old children, but for 6- or 7-year-olds, just explain how many inches the tree is across or around.) You’ll need to carry a tape measure.
A visit to a pond or a lake can be an opportunity to look at rocks on the shore: How many different colored rocks can you find? Bundle up on a rainy day and go out to look for animal tracks—dogs, cats, squirrels, birds—in the mud. Or make your own tracks and study them. Who has the biggest track? Who has the most distinguished tracks? Why are some tracks deeper than others?
A simple walk to find cones and pretty leaves teaches kids about nature.
The birds and “wild animals” in your neighborhood are another focus for nature study. How many different kinds of birds can you see? How many squirrels? Can you catch a butterfly or a flying bug in a net? Look at the butterflies you see and draw pictures of them. Look at the way butterflies and other flying bugs move through the air. Remember the boxer who “danced like a butterfly?” Can you and your children dance like a butterfly?
Where you live, do you have the ducks, Canada geese, raccoons, and possums that I have in my urban Seattle neighborhood? If not, a trip to the zoo may be in order, not to look at exotic animals but to concentrate on the locals.
CHECKLIST
Young Scientist’s Nature Kit