Camp-In

I love the idea of camping. It always sounds so amazing, and when I have really great memories of camping as a kid.  I wonder if my mom felt the same way because going camping with little ones seems like an awful lot of work.  Still, I hope someday we can take them and enjoy the great outdoors somewhere.  Not sure how or where one does that here in Nepal.  For now, I promised my son we would camp here at home.  I started a tradition with him that I think is quite fun, and he absolutely adores, and that is "Christmas camping," where we camp out in our sleeping bags by the Christmas tree one of the first days after it is put up.  He has begged to do it more and more.

So, recently, I decided it was time for our camp-out or camp-in, as is more aptly named.

We are pretty light on any formal "school" right now, but we did do a few fun camping-themed things leading up to our camp-in.

I found some pre-writing sheets and a "Which one is different?" page in the Camping Preschool Pack from Homeschool Creations.

One of the activities I was really excited to find was a set of Read! Build! Write! camping cards from 1+1+1=1.  I hadn't ever seen this cards before, and they are a great fit for Isaiah right now, and he really enjoyed them.  We only ended up doing one word, but I know we will use these cards again.  He also insisted on drawing his own picture of the word.

We found a couple fun camping books on wegivebooks.org:  Camping Day and This Monster Cannot Wait!  Both were really fun, cute books, but the boys both especially enjoyed Camping Day.

On the day of our big camping adventure, we constructed a makeshift "tent" in Isaiah's room, which I was really hoping wouldn't come down on us during the night.  It wasn't pretty, but we worked with what we had.

When it was time for dinner (pardon my boys in their post-bath minimalist attire!), we built a campfire.  I actually saw this idea on several sites, and, again, we had to use what we had.  I had saved several paper towel rolls that we used for logs, and then we tore up some red, yellow, and orange streamers I had found at a store here to put in our flames.

We "roasted" marshmallows!

And, we enjoyed our modified s'mores treats.  Since you can't really find graham crackers (or a reasonable substitute) here, I went for these s'mores pops.  The original idea was not mine, but the link on pinterest wasn't working, and it seemed pretty straightforward (though the picture on pinterest looked much prettier!). We melted some chocolate, dipped the marshmallows in the chocolate and then dipped them in crushed crackers (in our case, they were actually sort of a crunchy oatmeal cookie/biscuit).

Isaiah LOVED them.  Zeke mostly enjoyed playing with them. :)

Ezekiel was VERY sad to not actually get to stay the night in the tent with us, but it seemed unlikely that any of us would actually get any sleep, though I have promised him (and myself) that I'll give it a try at least once this summer with him included in the tent!