Outdoor Education is camp except a little more educational. Most of the groups that come in are school groups, usually 5th or 6th grade classes but on occasion, the class may be older or younger. Some groups are very small, probably will bring one class with around like 30 or so kids and then there's other schools who'll bring huge groups that are like 100 kids or so.
Depending on the size of the group, that's usually how long they stay. For example, if its just a small group of like 30 kids or so, most likely they'll only come for 2 days, 1 night since its easier for them to get through everything which such a small amount of kids and plus its cheaper. If its a huge group, like between 50-100 kids or so, they usually come for 3 days, 2 nights. We have a ton of different classes that we offer, some very educational, some with a lot of team building, and then some that are just fun and depending on what the school wants, those are the activities the school gets to do. So pretty much, every schedule is different group to group.
Some of the classes we offer are; bog hike, wilderness survival, animal survival, aquatic adventure, archeological, archery, canoeing, rock climbing, initiatives, challenge course, high ropes course, horseback riding. The classes are usually about 60-90mins long, somewhere along those lines depending on the schedule for the group. Those are usually done in the morning and afternoon and then we use the evenings for fun camp activities like campfires, square dances, mock rocks, or camp games like dutch auction, predator prey, ect. We also do night hikes but so far we've yet to do any night hikes with any of the Spring groups, only the Fall groups...probably because of how late it gets dark now.
Its still a lot of work because we're working from about 7:30am until about 10-10:30pm but its easier because we're not sleeping in the cabins with the kids and we don't have to get them ready for bed and stuff like we do during the summers. Each group brings chaperones that stay in the cabins with the kids. The chaperones are also there throughout the day for extra assistance or whatever if we ever need it, which is nice to have.
We also get church groups or other different type of groups that come in on the weekends and depending on what activities they want to do, the schedule is a little more laid back for the camp staff. The staff is much smaller during OE too, we only have 5 full time OE staff members this Spring but if we get a really big group like we did last week, we'll probably have 3-4 more people come in to work the group. The most we'll ever have working a group is probably 10 at the max, so that's a lot different from summer.
Sometimes the schedule can get very tricky, we'll have a big school group in from Monday to Wednesday afternoon and then have another big school group come in Wednesday morning and stay to Friday and then have weekend group(s) come in Friday evening. That's a lot of work, especially when during the middle of the week you have one group getting ready to leave and then you have another group arriving, its crazy! But its also a lot of fun after you get past the tiring part of it. This upcoming week we have a big school group coming in from Wednesday to Friday and then we'll have three different groups in over the weekend....fun!
