Counselor Ben tells everyone at Camp Adventure a story about caring for nature. Plus, join us for a sing-along, adventure building, Spanish lessons, and a creative challenge!
Counselor Ben tells everyone at Camp Adventure a story about caring for nature. Plus, join us for a sing-along, adventure building, Spanish lessons, and a creative challenge!
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.
Camp Adventure: A Kids Summer Camp Podcast
S1 E12 The Booming Tire
[INTRODUCTION]
[bugle plays a welcome]
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 12 at camp, and this week we’re exploring what it looks like to care for the world around us.
I’m camp counselor Ari, and I have loved being here at camp with you every week. It’s a beautiful day at Camp Adventure. So, let’s say hello to the GREATEST counselor, friend, and adventuring guide possible, Camp Counselor Ben to kick things off.
Ben: Ari, thank you once again, for everything you continue doing at Camp Adventure. We would be lost without you—CAMPERS—on this last week of camp, week 12(!), please give it up for our wonderful Ari!!!! You are the best!!
And Camp Adventure—all of my friends, all of you campers—YOU are also the BEST.
On Week 1, we set out to have a podcasting adventure with you, wherever you are in this BIG, BEAUTIFUL world. We’ve had some excitement, and some challenge—new challenges EVERY WEEK, actually! And I’ve learned many things. And when we get to storytime, today, I’ve got a story about finding something hidden in the woods, and about an explosive BOOM! we made on the river…. And—AND—about getting in serious trouble! But it’s also about learning something very good…. But we have to do camp songs and the mail bag before that, as you know.
During all of this camp time together, I hope that you have been learning new things and thinking about new things, too. What fun it has been to share all of these stories and challenges and activities with you….
And, of course—OF COURSE—I have LOVED how our counselor and friend, Hannah, has been sharing her songs with you. Let’s have one more HUGE round of clapping and cheering for our Camp Adventure Music Leader—Hannah.
You might remember that this Hannah -- she eats gummi bears for breakfast, and she prefers bike riding over car driving -- she does not talk in her sleep, but she SINGS in her sleep! -- and she always prefers to go barefoot, and she can swim over rivers with guitars in her hand, and she explores with her EARS -- and who knows what else this magical, wonderful camp music leader can do? She’s beyond amazing. So please welcome with me, on this last week of summer camp, please welcome the great and knowledgeable, the one, the only—my good friend—Hannah Glavor!!
[CAMP SONG]
Hannah: Oh friends, I am going to miss all of you - and all of this - CAMP ADVENTURE!
We have learned so much together, haven’t we? Don’t worry I’ve created a list!
We’ve learned things like…
[Sings]
Adventure’s trying new things,
Even when we don’t know what’s next
Cause with good courage we do great things
And we are open to discover
And when we fight to find the good
When we’re creating as creatives
When we are good and kind to new friends
Cause life is better with each other
Yes, when we love the earth and others
The world is better as we do
Campers, I want you to remember it is so important that we take care of each other and the world around us. We get to share this great planet we live on with all kinds of creatures, great green plants, water to raft on, and excellent humans to spend time with like you and me! The world is a better place because YOU are in it, and it is a better place because of everyone around us. Our differences make us stronger! And together, we can all make the world a better place.
[Sings]
When the world is full of worry, and you don’t know what comes next
Grab a hand and we’ll get through it - you’re not alone so don’t be stressed
Each day is full of wonder, so much good for us to share
When we love the earth and others
The world is better when we care
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
[REPEATS with camp counselors joining along]
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: Wow, everyone sounded so good!
My friends, I am going to miss you so much! As you are, wherever you are, you campers make all of this worth doing. Remember that YOU are creative, YOU are unique, and YOU have what it takes to see wonder all around you and find adventure in everything! It has been such an honor to spend this time with you, singing with you, hearing from you—I love this, and I love YOU.
May your life be full of endless adventure, friends! I hope to see you next summer - but before then, its that time where we get to hear from YOU one last time. It's time for … *ehem*…. (pause for effect) Drumroll please (then enter drumroll) MAIL BAG!
[MAIL BAG]
AKBA Counselor: 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.
It’s our last week at camp for this summer and I wanted to let you know that, while we’ll be saying goodbye to our campers and looking forward to next year’s Camp Adventure, you are welcome to send in your mail or write to us any time.
We’ve been going on this adventure together all summer and the connections you’ve made don’t stop when camp does. You can revisit past episodes and adventures any time you’d like. You can send in photos and stories and songs and jokes whenever you want. We’ll always be eager to receive and eager to share.
In fact, I’d love to know what you thought of camp! What was your favorite part? Was there a camp counselor with whom you really connected? Was there a particular episode you kept coming back to?
You can rate and review Camp Adventure on Apple Podcasts. And send us photos and videos and mail to listen@akidspodcastabout.com or on social media using #AKBAsummer. We just might pop into your podcast feed throughout the coming months to share what other campers have been up to.
That’s listen@akidspodcastabout.com or on social media using #AKBAsummer.
Thanks for being a part of our first year of Camp Adventure! LOVE you for that! And now let me pass you off to some other counselors who have loved spending time with you!
[ACTIVITIES]
Ari: Hey campers! It’s Camp Counselor Ari here with some more adventure building.
So far, we’ve talked about building our adventurers, the creatures they could meet, the places they can go, and the quests that they can go on. The possibilities for what our super adventure building story-telling machines can think up are absolutely endless.
All this adventure building can take a lot of time and planning and dreaming.
But I’ve found some of the very best parts of adventuring are when you’re storytelling with friends in the moment. Remember? “Adventure, We Venture, Together….”
See, there’s a special magic that happens when you create a story with other people as you go. It’s called improvisation.
And sometimes it might feel a little scary, if you’ve put a lot of time and imagination into preparing for your adventure to start out your adventure with someone else. What if it’s not like what you expected? What if they have different ideas than you? But you know what, I think that’s part of the magic!
When we listen to each other’s ideas, we start to imagine together. And wild and hilarious things can happen.
Let’s try it out! What if I want to go on an adventure in a ship? And maybe you, my friends, want to go adventuring to find a princess in the land of nightmares. The really fun part is when we put our ideas together and create something super special. Maybe our ship flies through the air and is powered by dreams and we set out on a quest to find the princess.
Wouldn’t that be so cool! I think you all make incredible adventure builders, and I can’t wait to hear all the stories you tell together.
Denise: Hey Campers!
It’s Camp Counselor Denise and I hope you’re ready for some Spanish learning and loving because that’s what we’re doing today!
You know, one of the best (and the scariest) things about camp is meeting new people and making new friends! And we all know that the best way to do this is by walking up to someone, saying hi, and introducing yourself.
So I thought for today, it would be good to do that in Spanish! So get ready.
Now, for the very first step, saying hi! There are lots of ways you can say “Hello” in English. Hey, hi, hello, top of the morning to ya!
Spanish is no different, but one of the easiest, most well-known, and best ways to say hello is: Hola.
Easy right? Short, simple, and straight to the point! Hola!
Ok then. Now, that we know that. Let’s do something fun. No matter where you are, or what you’re doing I want you to give your biggest and friendliest wave and say hola to all of your fellow campers. Ready? Go!
Well done! Now, for the next part. Introducing yourself. When telling someone your name, you can say: Mi nombre es.
Like this: Mi nombre es Denise.
Or if you’re feeling adventurous you can also say: “Me llamo”
Like this: Me llamo Denise.
Got it? Awesome! Now let’s put it all together and introduce ourselves to all of our fellow campers.
Ready? I’ll start. Hola, mi nombre es Denise. Y tu, ¿como te llamas? What’s your name?
Excellent! Un placer conocerlos a todos.
Thank you so much for hanging out with me everyone! I hope that you all keep practicing your Spanish and that you have a great rest of your time at camp.
¡Hasta luego!
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! Before we get cozy, let’s do a BIG stretch! If you can, try putting your feet together on the ground while you’re sitting. Then, when you move your knees up and down like this, you can imagine you’re a butterfly getting ready to lift off and fly away!
Now, 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 outside, under the big blue sky—wherever you go, get comfy!
Are you ready, Counselor Ben?
[STORYTIME]
Ben: Ari, thank you! Yes…. I am definitely ready for storytime. And this week’s story begins back in the same place that so many of our stories have taken place, back at that little gray house in Burlington, WI—the one on W. Chestnut St., just across from the Fox River.
One day, my sister Christy and I were exploring in the woods next to our house…. The woods with all of the black raspberries in it. And on this exploration, we definitely FOUND and ATE a lot of raspberries—I really like raspberries. Do you like raspberries? I bet you probably do….
Well, as we were exploring, we found interesting mushrooms growing on old rotten logs in the woods. We found and old, rusty metal bucket ½ buried in the dirt. It was a good bucket. We cleaned it out and used it for catching frogs and water snakes.
But then we found something big in the woods. Something heavy…. And round—can you guess what it was? It was black—shaped like a donut—made of old, black rubber that was drying and cracked…. Any guesses, now? Here’s one more clue—this is the thing on your car that makes contact with the ground….
That reminds me of one of my favorite songs, one that a great musician named Trey Anastasio and his friends Mike, Page, and John play—a song called “Contact”—and it goes like this…. “The tires are the things on your car that make contact with the ground, the tires are the things on you car that make contact with the ground….”
That’s right!!! We had found a big, old, black rubber car tire, and it still had the metal part, or the steel wheel part inside it too.
You might say: “Who cares? It’s just an old junky tire someone littered in the woods.” And you’d be right. But creative children can turn old junk into cool artwork sometimes, or into cool games sometimes, and that’s what we did.
We pried the old wheel out of the ground, and we brushed off the dirt, and WALLA—we had ourselves a big old heavy junk tire. So we started rolling it around.
“I have an idea!” my sister, Christy said. She was 6 years old, and I was 8. “Let’s make up a bowling game.”
So we set up our metal bucket, and two other buckets at the bottom of a hill in the woods, and we rolled the heavy tire to the top of the hill. Then we pushed it forward, and down, down, down the hill it went, getting faster and FASTER as it rolled down the hill….. AND KABLAMMMOOO!!! It blasted the buckets, and everything went flying! “Yes!!! That was awesome!!! Let’s do it again.”
So we played games with the tire, where we’d roll it around and crash it into things.
Then we tried to hang it from a rope, for a swing, but it was WAY TOO heavy. And then I had a great idea.
Well, it really was not a great idea—it was a terrible idea—but at the time, I didn’t know any better, and it seemed like it would be really fun.
Remember how I told you a story in Camp Adventure, Week 3, about building a raft and floating it out to an island on the Fox River? (If you haven’t heard that story, go back to Week 3 and check it out—that was a thrilling adventure on the water….)
Just past that island, there was and still is a bridge that goes over the river. A street called “Bienaman Road” goes over the river, and this bridge is high above the water.
My idea was to roll the tire down to that bridge… so we did that first. And it wasn’t easy—the tire was SO heavy.
But Christy and I finally got it all the way down to the bridge.
Then, we rolled it right up to the edge of the bridge…. Now just wait for a second, here—let me ask you—please raise your hands if you have ever like throwing stones in the river or a lake? Yes!!! Skipping stones is fun, too, but throwing big stones in the river makes BIG splashes, and we loved doing that.
Tell me this—if a good sized rock can make a big splash in the water, how big of a splash do you think a FULL TIRE would make, especially if you launched it off of a bridge!!!
That is exactly what we were thinking: “Let’s chuck this thing in the river and see what kind of splash it makes!!!”
We stumbled a little, trying to lift the heavy tire up over the guard rail. But we worked as team, and finally, we had it up off the street, balancing on the guard rail…. And I looked at Christy; she looked at me; we were both smiling and then—PUSSSSHHHHH >>> We sent it over the edge.
The tire seemed to fall in slow motion, down, down, down—flipping over and over in the air until --- BOOOOOMMMMM!!!!!!
It did not only splash into the water. It landed perfectly flat on the surface of the water, like it had done a belly flop, and the sound was like a stick of dynamite exploding, or like a loud fireworks BANG! It was so loud that it scared us…..
But what happened next was 10 times more scary.
The neighbor whose house was closest to this Bienman Rd. bridge happened to be out on his porch. And he saw the whole thing. And he came running straight at Christy and me, and his face was red, and he was yelling, and he was MAD.
“What are you kids thinking?!” he hollered out. “Why would you do that?!!!”
“We wanted to see if it would make a big splash…. We are sorry.”
“Big splash?! But what about trashing the river?!—You threw a tire in the river!!! Now I need to get it out of there—but I tell you what!—I’m going to be talking to your parents about this!!!”
And we watched him run down to the shore. He put his canoe in the water, and he paddled out to the floating tire, and he slowly drug it back to the banks and pulled it out onto dry land.
Thank goodness!!! That was a good, good neighbor.
Christy and I had made a terrible mistake—we thought about how fun it would be to make a big splash—but we did NOT think about how damaging it would be to throw garbage into our beautiful River. We felt awful inside.
That night, after the neighbor told our parents, we all had a good talk about the beauty of creation, of nature, and how we human beings are not to destroy the land, but we are here to live in the land, and with the land—being kind to the earth, not destroying it or throwing trash into it.
You tell me—when you see a beautiful lake with sparkling clean water, or when you see a lake filled with empty bottles, and trash, or even old tires floating around in garbage heaps—which one makes your heart sing more? Which one makes you feel wonderful, and which one makes you feel gross? Yeah—we love the clean world, the beautiful, natural way it was supposed to be. Not the trashy, dirty messes that we sometimes make.
Guess what? Christy and I never threw any tires in any rivers EVER again. And we never threw any other garbage in the river, or on the land, ever again. We learned a HUGE lesson that day…. I can still hear the TIRE BOOM on the river, and it reminds me to treat our world with love, and care, and respect….
And that feels like a good way to close out our Camp Adventure 2021—remembering that our explorations, and our adventures in the worlds around us—we all depend on the earth, and we all want to care for it. Bugs for our bug jars—rivers for our rafts and boats—hills to climb—trees for swinging and zip lines—peach trees in Tennessee and black raspberries from Wisconsin—wherever we go, we campers love being GOOD to the land we are living in.
Sound good, my friends? I think so. Let’s go forth from this Camp Adventure, and let’s each become people who love and care for the natural world around us.
Which reminds me of a cool challenge for our final camp challenge… .hang on! I’ll be right back with your last WEEKLY CHALLENGE
[WEEKLY CAMP CHALLENGE]
Ben: OK… my explorers… my adventurers… my Camp Adventure friends—this final challenge will be good for you and your friends and neighbors and whomever else you invite to complete the challenge with—AND—it’s going to be good for our land.
You will have one main challenge to complete—CREATIVELY—and you will have one MAJOR BONUS opportunity, as well.
First, the challenge: We want you to get creative with some garbage and make something beautiful out of objects that would normally be thrown away as boring ol’ trash. Here are a few ideas:
BOXES, find an old box, and turn it into a spaceship. Or into an imaginary adventure raft. Or into a fort, or a cool little restaurant you can pretend to cook things in. My sister and I once used an old refrigerator box to make a drive-thru food cart, and we used the pretend foods in our toybox to “sell” from our food cart. Maybe you can find a big old box and make it into something awesome.
BOTTLES & CANS, find an old bottle, and turn it into a vase. Paint it. Decorate it. Make it your own creation.
You can make paper maiche out of old papers, or you can make a bird feeder out of an old jar.
Ask your grownups or other friends for ideas, too. The No.1 goal is to re-use something that would otherwise end up in the garbage—rather than throwing it out, re-create it into something beautiful, or useful, or BOTH!! That is your final challenge. And I WANT TO SEE PICTURES OF WHAT YOU CREATE!!! So much, I do, so don’t forget to send in your pictures.
And here is the bonus. And the bonus is UNLIMITED, which means you can score unlimited bonus points for this last part….
As the summer ends, and you prepare to go back to school, you’re going to be out and about. On sidewalks. In parks. Wherever you are…. We at Camp Adventure will happily give you one MAJOR BONUS point for every piece of litter, or garbage, or trash that you pick up in your world. If you see an old box, or bottle, or piece of garbage… rather than leaving it there, and rather than chucking it into the river(!), just pick it up and recycle it.
I PROMISE you that I will be doing the same thing.
And just imagine this…. Camp Adventure campers all over the world, you and me and all of US, becoming people who help make our world cleaner—I imagine thousands of kids, all over the place, learning to become respectful and GOOD to the world around us. If we join together in this WAY of living, and this WAY of adventuring, then this podcast summer camp and everyone who has been a part of it—you and me—we will help to restore and renew our land. And that, my good friends, sounds like a very good adventure to me.
Have a wonderful school year. Try new things. And know that we will see you again, soon, as we all continue filling our lives with adventure!!!
[CLOSING]
Ari: Thanks, Ben! And thank you, campers for joining us at Camp Adventure this season. It’s been such a wonderful time adventuring with you all! We’d love to feature everything you and your fellow campers have gotten up to at Camp Adventure, so share 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 me, Ari Mathae, with help from Matthew Winner.
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 akidsco.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 season!