Counselor Ben tells everyone at Camp Adventure a story about the creativity that comes from boredom. Plus a sing-along, some poetry, and some fortbuilding!
Counselor Ben tells everyone at Camp Adventure a story about the creativity that comes from boredom. Plus a sing-along, some poetry, and some fortbuilding!
We’d love to feature you and your fellow campers on our next episode. Share your camp space and your new camp flag for Camp Adventure on social media using #AKBAsummer or write to us at listen@akidspodcastabout.com.
Poem credit: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58430/firefly-56d23ccbb5f21
Camp Adventure: A Kids Summer Camp Podcast
S1 E7 “Snakefort”
[INTRODUCTION]
Ari: Welcome to Camp Adventure! Camp is in your living room. Camp is in your car on the way to the store. Camp is under your blanket fort. Camp is everywhere. And Camp Adventure is for everyone, no matter where in the world you are. And camp counselors Ben and Hannah are ready to welcome you.
It’s week number 7 at camp, and this week we’re exploring creativity and boredom.
I’m camp counselor Ari, and I’m so excited to be here at camp with you every week. It’s a beautiful day at Camp Adventure. Let’s say hello to our friend, Camp Counselor Ben to kick things off.
Ben: Thank you, my friend—Counselor Ari! Thank you, and yes—Week 7 of Camp Adventure has begun, and this week is going to include water snakes—YIKES!!! And it’s going to include building, and creating, and I think one of the most important things ANY kid from ANYWHERE needs to learn to do… which is learning how to build a fort!
Have you ever built a fort? Raise your hands, both of them, high in the air if you have ever made a fort in your bedroom… Nod your head in slow motion if you’ve ever built a fort in your living room, or anywhere else INSIDE? Oh yeah … I see some heads nodding, now. And how about outside? If you’ve ever built a fort outside—ANYWHERE outside—raise your legs in the air and wiggle your feet. YES!!!
Now, I want you to close your eyes—and fold your arms over your chest—if you have ever been bored. OH my goodness—yes—you’re like me and all the other campers if you have ever felt bored … like everything is just the same, and everything is kind of boring…. Not very fun, is it?
My friends, when we get to this week’s storytime, I’m going to tell you a slithery story about water snakes… a story about being VERY BORED until we discovered how a certain, regular, boring ol’ shrub could become a fort for BIG ADVENTURES…. A story called “The Snakefort.” But we have to wait a little for storytime....
Right now, it’s time for songs!! Camp Adventure songs!!! And if it’s time for camp songs, that means it is time to introduce our fearless music leader, Hannah.
Now I do NOT know if Hannah has ever built her own fort. You might need to write her a letter and ask her. Maybe I should write a letter to Hannah? But I do know that Hannah has been creative before… in fact, I think Hannah is always creative. Musicians like her are usually pretty creative.
Did you know that this very summer, Hannah walked into an average backyard here in Portland, and it was just regular—it had a small lawn, and a few shrubs and an apple tree, and few lawn chairs, and everyone thought it was just a regular backyard, but she said: “This is not a boring backyard, at all! Let’s get CREATIVE and make this into a concert place—let’s have musicians bring their instruments over, and we’ll invite people, and we’ll put up beautiful lights and fiery torches—and she invited other musicians and lots of people and guess what?!—she turned a boring ol’ backyard into a beautiful night full of creative music for the whole neighborhood—she turned a regular ol’ lawn into a magical place of artistic sounds. Very cool.
That’s our Hannah, my friends—the great and knowledgeable, the one, the only—the musician who turns backyards into magical wonderlands for all her neighbors to enjoy—my good friend, Hannah Glavor!!
[CAMP SONG]
Hannah: Thanks Ben! Fun fact, I am an expert fort builder—both indoor and outdoor. I just love creating spaces that I can share with my friends just like that backyard concert underneath the apple tree.
I remember when I was little I used to pretend my living room was a movie theater, and I’d draw up pretend tickets and I’d pop popcorn, and I’d invite my entire family to a night at the movies—right in our own home.
I just love being a creative. But it’s not just musicians like me or a painter who paints or a builder who builds are creative. The truth is everyone has what it takes. It’s how we are made. Every one of us was made to think creatively—dreaming and making and doing awesome things! And what’s more, when we gather creative people together [sings] we learn from each other, and discover something new. . . . Wait, is that how the song goes? I don’t remember.
[Sings]
Do you ever sit and wish that you could do something new
Like when the grass is always greener or the sky is the same bluuuuuueeeeee
If we use a little wonder
We just might have a breakthroughhhhh
When we’re creating as creators, you can grow in your point of view.
Hannah: All right, here comes the part we know and love.
Adventure (adventure)
We venture (we venture)
Together with courage
We learn and grow STRONG
We learn from (we learn from)
Each other (each other)
So let's discover and uncover
Great adventures bright and new
Hannah: You guys, that sounds so good! I’m so proud of you, my creative campers. And I’m thankful for you. We are making music together. And we’re making it all over the place. And I can’t wait to do it with you again next week. But for now, we need to check out our Camp Adventure mailbag, and I can’t wait to see and hear all about the creations you campers are making—your camp flags, and your letters, and your videoclips that you’re posting. Are you ready? Drumroll please! It’s time for MAILBAG.
[MAILBAG]
AKBA Counselor Matthew: Hi everyone! I’m Camp Counselor Matthew and I’m here with the Mail Bag. It’s where I keep all the mail we receive for our campers. Let me just unzip the bag here and see what’s inside.
Oh my goodness we have got mail from two amazing campers! Pablo is from Camp Cute Reefs and WOW! What camp flag is AMAZING! I would travel to your underwater camp in a heartbeat, Pablo! We’ve also got a flag from Alejandro at Camp Irongolem which reminds me a lot of Minecraft with that very cool design. Also makes me think of one of my favorite animated movies: Castle in the Sky.
Anyway, Pablo sent in some videos of a raft made from the weekly challenge from Episode 2 and this raft is AWESOME! Pablo named his creation The Craft Raft and I spotted a Lego minifig floating on the raft deck. Is that right, Pablo? And guess what? That raft stayed together AND stayed afloat! Much different from the fate of Camp Counselor Ben and his friend from the raft story he shared.
Big high fives to Pablo and Alejandro for sharing!
We’d love to know about your camp experiences and so, to ALLLLLL of our Camp Adventure campers and families and friends, send us photos and videos and mail to listen@akidspodcastabout.com or on social media using #AKBAsummer. We’ll share as many things as we can from our Mail Bag each week.
That’s listen@akidspodcastabout.com or on social media using #AKBAsummer.
And that’s it! Have a great day at camp!
[ACTIVITIES]
AKBA Counselor Emma: Hi, campers! It’s Camp Counselor Emma here. When I’m not helping to run camp, I get to edit books for kids like you, which I love!
The way I see the world is shaped by words. I have always loved reading, and it’s had a big impact on how I think about the language we use. I want you to close your eyes and think about how you feel when you hear these words:
“It’s so nice to see you!”
“Do you want to go get ice cream this afternoon?”
“Let’s build a giant fort out of blankets and pillows and watch our favorite movies this afternoon!”
“I love you!”
How did that make you feel? When I hear words like that, I feel excited, happy, and safe. What are some of your favorite words? Take a moment and think about it!
Like I mentioned before, I love to read! Which is why I am so excited to have you all join me for a Camp Adventure poetry segment this summer! I’m going to share a few different poems throughout our time at camp together that paint beautiful word pictures in my mind (and some are even kind of funny).
The one I’m going to share today is by one of my favorite authors named Jacqueline Woodsen. I thought this poem was perfect for camp because it’s called “Firefly.” Before we listen, I want you to get real comfy and then close your eyes. Focus on the words and the pictures they create.
OK, are we ready?
Deep breath in… and deep breath out.
“Firefly,” by Jacqueline Woodsen
It’s almost May
And yesterday
I saw a firefly.
You don’t see
Them a lot
In the city.
Sometimes
In the park
In the near dark
One comes out
You’ll hear
A little kid shout
Lightning bug! Firefly!
It’s almost May
And yesterday
I caught a firefly in my hand.
First firefly I
Seen in a
Long, long time.
Make a wish,
Miss Edna said.
Make a good one.
Firefly wishes always come true.
Wow! What did you guys think? Have you spent a summer evening catching fireflies before? Or even if you haven’t, could you imagine what that might be like?
Thanks so much for joining me for today’s poetry segment! I can’t wait to share with you all next time.
AKBA Counselor Denise: Hey Campers!
It’s Camp Counselor Denise, here.
Are you enjoying your time at Camp Adventure so far? You know, I think the best thing about Camp Adventure is that you can go to camp no matter where you are in the world!
You see, I’m actually from a tiny little island in the Caribbean called Puerto Rico. Have you heard of it?
It’s a beautiful place that is sometimes called La Isla del Encanto. Which means The Island of Enchantment. Living in a place with a name like that you can only imagine the kinds of adventure I had growing up!
There are a lot great things about living in Puerto Rico that I love, I could go on forever, but one of the coolest things is that I actually grew up speaking and hearing Spanish all around me—like a lot of you!
Speaking Spanish always makes me think of home and all the wonderful memories I have of growing up there. And like it’s not so far away, no matter where I am in the world.
So, I thought it might be fun for all of us here at camp to speak Spanish together! What do you say?
Alright then, I think the best place to start is with my favorite word in any language: chocolate!
If you’ve been listening since the very beginning, you know that chocolate is a pretty big deal here at Camp Adventure.
And chocolate in Spanish is—drum roll please—chocolate
Easy right? Chocolate. Rolls right off the tongue. Now let’s say it all together. Ready?
Chocolate
Yes, great job everyone!
I love chocolate. All the best camp treats are made of chocolate—chocolate caliente, crepas, s’mores! Though, I’ve never actually had s’mores, but I hear they’re great!
You know, one of my favorite things about chocolate, other than how delicious it is, it that it’s actually spelled the same in English and Spanish! I don’t know about you, that’s pretty cool.
Alright that’s all we have time for today. Thanks for hanging out with me everyone! Keep practicing and I’ll be back with more fun words soon.
Ari: All right campers, after this break we’re going to hear a story from Camp Counselor Ben, and I promise, you won’t wanna miss it!
[BREAK]
Ari: Okay, we’re back, and it’s storytime! Are you excited? Me too!
So, let’s get ready for this week’s story! Try stretching your arm over your head to one side like you’re giving someone a big wave with your whole body. Now the other arm. That felt good, now let’s get cozy. In just a sec let’s hit pause to get in this week’s perfect listening spot. 3, 2, 1 GO! Where’d you pick? This week I’m listening, all snuggled up on my couch with some tea—wherever you go, get comfy!
Are you ready, Counselor Ben?
[STORYTIME]
Ben: Ari, thank you. And yes, the time for stories has come … YES! … and I just have to warn you up front—this week’s story is going to be very BORING at first. But hang on, because after it is BORING, it will get very SLITHERY…. And after it gets slithery, it will get CREATIVE and exciting…. Shall we begin? Yes, I think so, too.
Our story begins back when I was eight years old, back in Burlington, WI, in the same little gray house that I’ve told a few stories about… remember the rafting adventure from Week 2? If you haven’t heard that one, no problem! You can always go back and listen to Week 2.
But if you remember, my little gray house was right across W Chestnut St. from the Fox River…
And my sister Christy and I played in our backyard ALL the time. In fact, we played out there so much that it started to get kind of boring. I mean, we already knew about EVERYTHING in the backyard… same old lawn… it was just flat. Same old sandbox… we liked the sandbox, but after a while, it was kind of boring. Same old trees…. We loved to climb trees, but after you have climbed the same tree hundreds of times, it gets kind of old….
So we were doing what most kids do when they are bored. Do you know what that is? What do you do when you are bored?
Maybe NOT ALL kids do this, but when we got bored, we started complaining about being bored. “There is NOTHING to do,” we said with frowns on our faces. “This is so LAME.”
But whenever we started getting bored and complaining about it, my mom would give us extra chores to do. “If you’re so bored,” she said, “then you can do more work around the house.”
So we were bored, but we did NOT want to have a bunch of new chores to do, so we decided to NOT complain.
What did we do instead? We did the only thing a kid can do when they are bored—we got creative.
“Let’s go down by the river and see if we can catch any water snakes,” Christy said. That seemed reasonable… big, flat stones lined the riverbanks, and when it was sunny outside, the rocks warmed up. Guess what loves to sit on warm stones? Yes! Reptiles… especially snakes from the Fox River.
So we got a big gray bucket and started catching water snakes. NOW—CAMPERS—this is NOT a good thing for you to do unless you get permission from your grownups. Some parts of the United States have poisonous snakes, and Christy and I did NOT catch poisonous snakes.
These little snakes were grayish black, and if you snuck up on them VEEERY slowly, and if you moved your hand VEEERY careful, you could grab the snakes right behind their head—and of course we grabbed them GENTLY—and you could pick them up and check them out.
So all afternoon, we caught little water snakes and collected them in our big gray bucket until we had 10 snakes!!! Imagine looking into a bucket and seeing ten snakes, all slithering around… It was kind of freaky, but it was also cool.
And then we took them to our backyard, and we dumped them all out at the same time, and all the snakes slithered through the grass, and then over W. Chestnut street and back into the Fox River. It was a race!!! And Christy’s snakes won the race…. Well, most of them were the first to go back into the water…. Except for ONE snake that slithered over to a HUGE cedar bush.
And it disappeared under the bush!
So Christy went into the bush after it…. She got on her hands and knees, and she lifted a branch, and then she disappeared! It was like the bush had swallowed her up!
“Hey!” I yelled to her. “Where did you go?”
And then her voice came from inside the bush: “Ben!! Come in here! It is so cool!”
So I got on my hands and knees and crawled in after her. And when I got inside, it was like a green, prickly cave… the pine needles were scratchy, and it was not very spacious—but the little branches made a roof over our heads, and the big branches made perfect walls.
“Let’s turn this into a fort!” I said. Now we were being creative.
We hurried back and picked up a small saw, and a pair of clippers from Mom’s shed for clipping branches. Back inside the big cedar bush, we trimmed away dead branches… and we trimmed the prickly branches that scratched our faces, and pretty soon…. Our fort was spacious.
We got two small lawn chairs, and we made a little table out of a stump. Then we got some adventure snacks—you can’t have a good adventure without adventure snacks—and then we whittle spears, and we got flashlights. We dug a hole and put a wooden box filled with treasure in it!! Every fort needs a secret treasure stash….
And we collected paper tubes and created lookout binoculars. After a few days of working on our fort, we were ABSOLUTELY NOT BORED AT ALL. And this old cedar bush—I mean—it was nothing special. Just an average, boring old bush. But not anymore!!! With a little creativity, it had become our secret fort!!! It was like our own little camp cabin…. Just the way we liked it.
And then we had to name the fort, because every good fort needs a name. We argued for a while about what to call it, and then Christy said: “I KNOW!!! Let’s call it the ‘Snake Fort’ because this is where we catch snakes!”
She was right. “The Snakefort” was a perfect name. And then we had to make a camp flag for our fort, so we got our best paper and crayons, and we colored a picture of a big blackish gray snake, and wrote “SNAKEFORT” over the top. Once we hung that flag up, our fort was complete.
And guess what? We kept working on our fort all summer. We got a little brass bell, and we put it by the door, and to enter the fort, you had to ring the bell and say the code word before you could enter—our codeword was “Slithery Serpents.” We had imaginary adventures in that fort all summer, and we hardly ever got bored. It was like there was always something cool to do, as long as we remembered to be creative.
And guess what else? I am older now, as you know… But two years ago, I took my kids, Wesley and Annabelle, to see that old gray house on W. Chestnut St. in Burlington, and right there, still on the riverbank across from the old house—there was that old cedar bush still growing!! I got to show my own kids the old SNAKEFORT…. And we wondered: Which kids will be the next adventurers who turn this old, regular bush into something AWESOME. Something adventurous!!
I wonder what kinds of bushes you have around your world? Or maybe a good tree you can use for a fort? I bet that if you get creative, you can also avoid boredom and make a cool fort…. And I will have more to say about that in a second, here, because it is time for our Weekly Challenge…. Can you guess what we’re going to do this week? I bet you can…. I’ll be right back…..
[WEEKLY CAMP CHALLENGE]
Ben: All right my campers! It is time for your Weekly Challenge—the seventh challenge—which means that this one COULD be a lucky challenge… sometimes they say the number seven is a lucky number, you know…
This week’s challenge is simple… but you’ll have to be CREATIVE… which means you’ll have to look at some of the things around your house, or your apartment, or your garage or yard or down at the park—you’ll have to look at stuff that seems average or boring, and you’ll have to turn it into something new.
For example, how many of you think that a blanket is SUPER DUPER EXCITING. Raise your hand. Well, OK… I see a few hands going up. I guess blankets are pretty cool. But most often, blankets are pretty average…. Everyone’s got blankets laying around. But I’ll tell you what—if you drape those blankets just right over the back of your couch, or over the chairs and other things in your bedroom, you can make a KILLER blanket fort…. I know FOR SURE that some of you already have—in fact, some campers have already made forts for their camp cabins, and they’ve already hung their campflags up on the fort!! I’ve seen the pictures!!!
So, maybe look around inside your house for sheets or blankets you can use, and create a fort.
Remember, you can make it however you want, but good forts usually have walls of some kind and a roof of some kind…
Or how about umbrellas? I’ve seen kids take three or four regular old umbrellas, and they open them up and set them together just right, and you can make a little dome to hide out inside. VERY cool.
You can make forts with old scrap wood if you have some of that laying around, or out of branches and leaves. My daughter Annabelle once gathered tons of sticks around the playground at our city park, and she built a cool fort right there in the park. It looked like Eyore’s house on Winnie the Pooh, they one made of sticks!
You can build forts in closets, and in basements, and in bedrooms, and pretty much ANYWHERE you are. That’s the challenge, my friends—to build your own fort!!
And don’t forget to create a name for your fort at the end, and then make a flag for it and hang it up. That’s like putting the cherry on top of an ice-cream sundae—it really finishes the project nicely.
And of course, send me some pictures!!! We’ll open them up and check them out during our Mail Bag time. Sound good? It sounds excellent to me…. Can’t wait to see what you build!! What you make and invent… I can’t wait to see your CREATIVITY!!!
And, as usual, I can’t wait to see you next week :)
Here’s Ari one more time to remind you how to send in your pictures and stories and video clips….
[CLOSING CREDITS]
Ari: Thanks, Ben! And thank you, campers for joining us at Camp Adventure this week. We’d love to feature you and your fellow campers on our next episode. Share your camp space and all your weekly camp challenge creations on social media using #AKBAsummer or write to us at listen@akidspodcastabout.com.
Camp Adventure is written by Ben Tertin with help from the A Kids Podcast About team. Original music is by Hannah Glavor. Check out Hannah’s albums at https://hannahglavor.bandcamp.com.
The show is edited and produced by Matthew Winner with help from me, Ari Mathae.
Audio production is by Chad Michael Snavely and the team at Sound On Studios. Our executive producer is Jelani Memory. And this show was brought to you by A Kids Podcast About.
Listen to other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsbookabout.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out Ben’s book, A Kids Book About Adventure.
See you back at Camp Adventure next week.