Camp Wildcraft
  • Home
  • SUMMER 2023 DETAILS
    • REGISTER!
    • Camp Life!
  • ART PARTIES
  • ART BOXES
    • Art Box Videos
  • Blog

The Wildcraft Wonder Cabinet

3/13/2019

5 Comments

 
Welcome to the second edition of our Camp Wildcraft blog, "The Wildcraft Wonder Cabinet." Periodically,  we'll be sharing what we're learning about art and creativity, how nature helps us thrive, and growing compassionate and resilient kids. Our second edition explores RESILIENCE-- a quality we actively nurture as part of the Wildcraft experience. ​
Picture

GROWING RESILIENT KIDS
​

By Shari Davis, Camp Wildcraft Co-Founder/Director
"Resilience is the capacity to bounce back from the bumps of everyday life. All children are born with natural resilience, but kids have different degrees of buoyancy."   Dr. Kenneth Ginsberg
​
So how do we nurture greater buoyancy in our kids so they can bounce back in the face of challenges-- both large and small? I've spent much time researching, pondering, and observing the ingredients of resilience. I'd love to share some insights I've gleaned  directing a teen wellness program for a local non-profit,  training educators on this topic,  and of course observing our kids each summer at camp. 

Why do we want resilient kids? 
We all encounter challenges in our daily lives. It's part of being human. But resilient people see challenges as opportunities to learn. Resilience is a mindset that starts developing in early childhood, and fortifies children with the capacity to learn from and cope with difficulties,  At home and at summer camp, caring adults can coach our kids to think through and learn from the everyday challenges they encounter so they can move forward with optimism and confidence. 
So how do we  nurture resilience? 
  • Support kids in developing competence and confidence. Competence is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. Confidence is gained through developing competencies and seeing that they are capable!  
  •  Use the Power of YET. When our children experience a setback or failure, frame it in a way that promotes perseverance and grit. Re-frame the failure by adding the powerful word YET.  For example: I’m not good at multiplication vs. I’m not good at multiplication yet. The first example uses a fixed mindset and promotes a defeatist attitude. The second illustrates that there is room for growth and improvement. 
  • Small stumbles when you are young (when stakes are relatively small) show that you can learn and bounce back from challenges.  Coach kids to talk through difficulties; ask them questions which guide them to find their own solutions. 
  • Build emotional resilience in kids through the simple act of active listening. Practice listening to your children without fixing.  Help kids think through problems, for example, you can say, "Hmmm, that sounds tough, how do you think you want to handle that?"
  • Encourage kids to build strong social connections with good friends and supportive adults including teachers, coaches, camp counselors and others who are positive influences.
  • Practice and model resilient behavior as parents. Talk to your kids about what you have learned from your own challenges.  
Picture
What gets in the way of resilience? 
  • Not allowing kids to fail or take risks: When kids are not allowed to make mistakes, or take healthy risks, they don't learn the mental tools and perspectives to persevere, try again and and bounce back. 
  • "Bumpers and guard rails": Parents can  serve too long as protectors, which gets in the way of kids seeing they can thrive outside their comfort zone. 
  • Too quickly intervening:  If parents step in too fast when kids feel frustration and distress,  they don't develop self-efficacy and confidence to rise above the inevitable disappointments and challenges. 
  • "Bubble-wrapped kids": When children always have things done for them, and have no control of the outcome, it can lead to "learned helplessness." Julie Lythcott Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult, stresses the importance of intentionally teaching life-skills to encourage confidence and autonomy. 
  • Not letting kids construct their own separate identity: kids need to be encouraged to develop healthy selves, separate  from their parents, and other siblings, so they can "own" their lives and identify and value  their unique strengths and interests.

Summer Camp is the perfect environment to nurture resilience. Each day, out in nature, kids practice independence and self-efficacy, build new friendships and a range of new skills. At Camp Wildcraft this is core to our mission and our staff is trained to actively nurture a resilience mind set  in all of our campers. 

A few (highly) recommended  go-to resources 
BOOKS
Julie Lythcott-Haims, 
How to Raise an Adult
Click here for Julie's YouTube video 
Any book on brain-based parenting by the remarkable Dan Siegel, M.D. 
The Whole Brain Child
The Yes Brain
Parenting from the Inside Out 
Click here for Dan Siegel's  YouTube video
Maggie Levine, The Price of Privilege
Jessica Lahey , The Gift of Failure 
WEBSITES
https://www.heysigmund.com/building-resilience-children/
www.fosteringresilience.com/7cs_parents.php
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/
​
https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/emotional-resilience/#build-emotional-resilience
Brene Brown on Empathy--a must-see 30 second animated video

Do you have additional resources or thoughts to share? Please add them here!
Picture
5 Comments

The Wildcraft Wonder Cabinet

2/3/2018

1 Comment

 
Ideas and inspiration for growing creative, curious and caring kids who feel at home in nature.
Welcome to the first edition of our blog , "The Wildcraft Wonder Cabinet." Each month  we'll be sharing what we're learning about art and creativity, how nature helps us thrive, and growing compassionate and resilient kids. Our first edition explores CURIOSITY--one of the core values of Camp Wildcraft. We invite you to add to the comments; we're curious to hear about what you are  discovering  as well!  
Picture

Wonder, Curiosity & The Need to Collect...
​

Picture

Think about a time you found a mysterious seed pod or a  feather as you hiked a  trail or found a smooth shard of sea glass or a prized shell while carefully scanning the wet sand on the beach.  

​
What drives the desire to find and collect surprising, unusual or everyday wonders  is a  heightened sense of curiosity, strong observation skills  and a love of the hunt! Benny, our Camp Wildcraft Co-Founder,  has a good eye for finding all things weird and wonderful--from fossils and feathers, to wire and metal objects, rescued from the road, after being twisted into random and amusing pattens by the tires of passing traffic! 

The impulse to seek, collect, categorize and display unique artifacts, or ordinary wonders, has compelled  us humans since ancient times. Cultures  around the world  have long collected and displayed sacred objects in shrines and alters to mark a holy or sacred place.  During the Age of Exploration from the 1400's  to 1600s, Europeans started traveling the world and brought back natural and cultural wonders: fossils and skeletons, plants and shells, that they considered unusual, rare and wondrous. These travelers built Cabinets of Curiosities, or Wonder Rooms, in essence, shrines to nature,  that are considered  our  our earliest   museums. 

Wonder and curiosity are similar, both focus our attention and enliven our existence. But curiosity is a shade different than wonder as it leads us to action – towards a next step to discover more. Indeed most educators believe that real learning begins with curiosity as this fuels motivation to know more, understand, and make connections. 

So how might we encourage greater curiosity in our kids (and ourselves!)? Here are some approaches  to experiment with: 
  • Encourage kids to ask questions, but don't be so quick to answer them. Challenge them to find their own answers, in books, on line, asking people who might know, or through experiments. 
  • Create new conversational traditions around the breakfast and dinner table.  Ask each other what you are/were curious about today-- and what you discovered, what you still need to find out-- and how you plan to do it. 
  • Encourage inquisitiveness about strangers--look at the driver or  passengers in the car next to you and ask "what do you think their life is about? Take advantage of any comfortable opportunity to talk with people you don't know. Find ways to learn about and connect with people whose culture is different than your own.
  • Create lots of space for unstructured play and tinkering. Play fuels curiosity which in turn fuels creativity,  enabling  us to make surprising connections and fuel deeper learning and understanding. 
  • Don't be so quick to throw out your kids' stuff--help them create spaces to collect, curate, arrange and physically ponder relationships between objects they find and create. 
  • Model curiosity for your children--let them see that you never stop exploring and learning. Talk about things that you are intrigued by and what you discovered. 
  • Get outside your comfort zone! Each week try something new, go on a field trip, explore a new part of the city, visit a museum, learn a new skill, cook different foods together, embrace unpredictability and surprise. 
  • Encourage your kids to make a Wonder Cabinet. Suggestions below. But don't do it for them, just give them a nudge and let them build new skills and follow their own curiosity.
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious,”  Albert Einstein 

Create Your Own Wonder Cabinet!

Picture
  • Create a space in the house or yard where your collection can be arranged, exhibited, shared and talked about.
  • Be creative and recycle. Consider: an old shelf, fishing tackle box, pizza box, embellished shoe box, rows of recycled jars or plastic containers, plastic ziplock bags tacked to a cork board.
  • Collect things that surprise, inspire, and interest you.  Use all your five senses to notice the wonder in everyday things, the patterns in nature, unusual  objects found along the way. 
  • Check out the book Cabinet of Curiosities by Gordon Grice. This inspiring and instructive  book for kids includes lots of ideas on how to make your own. 
  •  Visit great local collections: Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park, The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City (kids 8 and up), the The Fowler Museum of Global Art at Culture at UCLA for starters. 


A Gallery of Wonder Boxes, Discoveries & Collections
 from
 Camp Wildcraft 

"Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder and spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals
the​ 
human spirit."   e.e. cummings

Subscribe to our Camp Newsletter!

Our new Camp Wildcraft Newsletter is a great way to  stay up to date on Wildcraft discoveries, news and events. 
Subscribe to Newsletter
Follow Camp Wildcraft on Instagram and Facebook 
Picture
1 Comment

    Authors

    Shari Davis and Benny Ferdman are artists, educators, co-founders of Camp Wildcraft--and passionate collectors of wondrous and surprising objects and stories found along the trail. 

    Archives

    March 2019
    February 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Growing creative, curious, confident & caring kids who feel at home in nature

​
COPYRIGHT  Camp Wildcraft 2016. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • SUMMER 2023 DETAILS
    • REGISTER!
    • Camp Life!
  • ART PARTIES
  • ART BOXES
    • Art Box Videos
  • Blog