NEWS

Education expert: Get your children outside for the summer and let them create

Kim Strong
York Daily Record

Suellen Kneller doesn't let her Stewartstown home swallow her 10-year-old son during the summer.

TV and video games pull him - and most kids - into their vortex.. But there's something bigger and better for young Logan in the summer, and his mother won't allow him to miss it: the great outdoors.

"I think a good balance is what we need," Kneller said. "We get outside. We ride our bikes to the tennis courts. We walk each day. I think it’s important."

She enrolls him in half-day camps through the summer to keep his sense of exploration strong, and she counters that with brain exercises every day: 15 minutes of math and 20 minutes of reading. "It's just like brushing your teeth," Kneller said.

These precious summer months fly by so quickly, and the idea of spending those in a classroom or drilling down on school lessons isn’t best for a child.

That’s according to Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an author and public speaker on education reform and peaceable classrooms. She's a professor emerita at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., as well as a mother and grandmother. "Kids need experiences that give them the well-rounded-ness to be healthy people and grow up to be healthy adults," she said.

Children play in a corn box with toy trucks after experiencing real ones during the Truck Zoo at Paul Smith Library of Southern York County.

Play time and creative time are critical parts of a child's growth, she said. 

"Coming to love nature and explore it … those things come from early experiences and a comfort level from being in the world and being comfortable with your own creativity," she said. "It doesn’t necessarily come from a TV set or phone. Children need to learn that early in life."

The problem with a digital screen is that a young child begins to learn that the answers to questions and the creativity to problem solving exists within the digital box, rather than the child's own mind, Carlsson-Paige said. 

Children need to accomplish tasks and arrive at the finale. They need to work hard at something and cross the finish line, she said. That work - the skill, the creativity, the perseverance - shows them that through hard work, the task is completed. The feeling of completion, the success of accomplishing something, small or large, is critical for a child or teenager to feel. 

"You don’t learn to work hard because someone tells you to work hard," she said. "You learn to work hard because you engage in efforts and accomplish something."

Why kids need creativity time

Creativity scores in children have been diminishing over time.

That was uncovered in 2010 by a researcher in the field of creativity, Kyung Hee Kim. She is now the author of "The Creativity Challenge: How we can recapture American innovation."

In 2010, Newsweek reported on her research, where she had analyzed 300,000 creativity tests from children and adults and discovered that scores were falling, while IQ scores have increased each decade.

"Definitely we would want the months that kids aren’t in school to play, engage in the arts, to expand their whole self," Carlsson-Paige said. "Play is a form of creativity and creative expression. Recess is very important. All of these things have fallen away as the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act put an emphasis on test scores."

This is the first day of school at Weigelstown Elementary, and while many parents worry endlessly about the success of their children in school, an education expert says to relax a little bit, especially during the summer. Let them pull out their creativity and sense of adventure. Much will be gained there.

Rule No. 1: Have fun

Bob Russo of Delta had a job in marketing, where he made a lot of money but didn't have a lot of fun. He finally told his wife one day that he didn't want to do it any longer, and the two opened a skate park.

Russo loves working with kids. When the skate park's competition bore down on him, he closed it and invited children to his new summer camp: Our Place Summer Adventure Camp.

That was 20 years and 4,500 kids ago.

Today, he could have as many as 70 children in his buses on a given day, wheeling them toward a day-long adventure in the area.

He doesn't actually have a camp. The camp starts at the bus stop where he and his 10 counselors pick up his kid cargo for the day and head off to a park or pool.

The list of rules for the camp are short, and they start with: You gotta have fun.

"If the kids want to eat lunch at 10 in the morning, eat. I could care less," Russo said. "If they don’t want to swim, that’s OK, we’ll sit and talk."

He plays card games with the children, and on the anniversary of D-Day, he talked with his campers about it, he said. "My wife taught for 38 years, and she said kids outta be learning in the summer, but not out of a textbook."

For his camp, children might spend a week or two as campers, and a few spend the whole summer with "Mr. Bob." The cost is $160 a week for 6- to 13-year-olds.

Suellen Kneller enrolls her son each summer in a week-long program at Hopewell Area Recreation and Parks that's called Wildlife Adventure Week. A local teacher will take in snakes and lizards one day, and another day is at Hopewell Dam.

All that adventure and hard work has paid off for Kneller's son, Logan; he's in the gifted program at his school and reading and doing math a couple of years above his grade level.

For the parent who wants to do some of those things for free or low prices, local parks have numerous programs for children. Nixon Park in York County has a number of outdoor adventure programs for children and volunteer opportunities for teens, for example.

Looking past children in the Glen Rock Playground Program and trees is the area of the future dog park in Glen Rock Community Park. The playground program is free to all those in the Glen Rock zip code and is in the first week of a four-week program.

The price of summer

The price of a week of summer camp costs between $199 and $800 (or more) in the United States, according to the American Camp Association. 

Kneller admits that she and her husband are fortunate that they can afford to take their son to the National Aquarium and the Science Center in Baltimore, but she also tries out free and inexpensive brushes with nature, too.

Here are some free or less expensive local options as alternatives to camp:

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