September 2025 🌎🪱💎⛏️
Outdoor Education: The Power-Packed Earth🌎
As this newsletter goes out, we are finishing up the last week of Outdoor Education, and there have been over 1000 (we’ll have better numbers at the end) students, teachers, and parents exploring Camp Nathanael. The program runs from September 4th – October 3rd.
The Power-Packed Earth’s program helps students put the scientific method into practice and learn about the resources God has filled our earth with!
What does a field trip look like? 🚌
- Before arriving, teachers receive a packet of information and break students up into teams of 15-20.
- Students arrive at 915am by bus and are then greeted by their team leader
- The program starts at 940am. Before this, students go for walks over to the swinging bridge/visit the bathroom.
- The opening program includes letting the kids know what to expect that day and an invitation to Summer Camp and other events on campus.
A Morning of Experiments 🧪🔬
- After the program in the gym, they are introduced to Professor IQ, who, despite his name, creates a problem of mixing elements (sugar, plaster, salt, corn starch, baking powder) and needs help deciphering what he mixed up.
- Each team is given a bag with 2 elements mixed up, and it is their job to discover what’s inside.
- Each team goes from station to station to learn about the different elements and how they react to things like water, iodine, and even fire.
- At the end of the morning, the groups have all the information they need to decipher which 2 elements got mixed up in their bag.
- After the morning program at 11:20am, the students eat lunch in the Picnic Shelter by the Troublesome Creek.
And an Afternoon of Discovery ⛏️💎🪱
- In the afternoon, the teams go through 5 learning stations: sluicing or panning for gems, coal mines where kids crawl through a makeshift coal shaft, learning about dirt and worms, shopping in the store (all with items themed to the field trip, and riding the Camp Train!
- The day finishes up around 1:25pm.
If there are too many students and teams, they are split in half, with one set doing experiments in the morning and the other doing the discovery activities, and then they switch in the afternoon. Typically, we have both experiments and discovery happening at the same time with different groups!
Father & Son Hike
We also had our Father & Son Hike on Saturday, September 13th! Dads got time to spend with their son(s) hiking one of the trails at camp. Halfway through the hike, we cooked hot dogs over a fire, did some devotions together, and did a shelter-building competition! This has been a small ministry idea we have been testing out over the past few years, and it always ends up being tiring and fun!
Part of Camp’s 93 years of ministry is keeping strong, longstanding ministries going and trying out new ones! Outdoor Education was once a new thing to try, and it’s become a staple!
Pray with us
- Pray for M and his mom. She is doing amazing and is so excited to get M back full-time. We are excited for her and M, and the transition back home should be happening soon.
- Pray for upcoming events! Our weekend retreats are starting back up soon! If you have campers in 4th-5th or 6th-8th grades and want to try Camp out for just 1 night, now is the chance! https://campnathanael.org/overnights
