With over 1,”000 acres of nature, five miles of meandering trails to roam, and a 50-acre lake as a centerpiece, one camp out of the nearly 200 that are listed in this issue of the News sounds like the classic place that comes to mind when picturing a perfect summer camp.##M:[more]##
Most amazing is that Plainsboro residents don’t even have to leave their own township’s borders, and for those living in West Windsor, it’s a hop, skip, and jump away. And even with so much open space, the summer class programs at the Plainsboro Preserve are limited to about 15 children a piece.
One Plainsboro family has been taking advantage of the preserve’s close proximity and interesting camp programs. Last summer Matthew Greenberg was approaching his Bar Mitzvah and needed to decide where he would do his volunteer work. He turned to the Plainsboro Preserve, a place already familiar to his family and one that would cater to his interest in the environment.
Greenberg, a Plainsboro Village resident, volunteered as a camp counselor there with his mother, Laura Nash, during the program’s week-long class centered around the five senses — taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight. And with the expansive preserve serving as the backdrop to the adventures the children would explore using those senses, both he and his mother say they came away with a greater awareness of even the little things in nature.
For years, Matthew, now 13, along with his parents and his two brothers, had been attending programs held by the New Jersey Audubon Society at the nature preserve. Nash says sometimes the family would catch one-time activities like star-gazing at night. They attended weekly story times, in which a Plainsboro Library staff member would read books with nature themes to the children gathered at the preserve, and they make visits regularly throughout the year.
Nash, whose family maintains an active membership with the New Jersey Audubon Society, recalls making donations after first hearing plans for the preserve, and walking along its trails in the first week it was open in September, 2001. “We had made a couple of informal visits ourselves and gone on a lot of trails, and we’ve done some of the evening activities they have for families,” she said.
That’s how the idea of volunteering at the camp program held at the preserve came into play for Matthew, who attends Community Middle School. He already had an interest in the environment, one that began when he was younger. “I hear a lot about global warming, and how it’s destroying our environment, and I just wanted to do something about it,” Matthew says. “I’ve always liked animals and nature.”
Greenberg believed one of the ways to get people, in general, to be more interested in the environment is to start with kids, which is another reason he started volunteering there, Nash says. Greenberg himself became interested early on after learning about it in school and from his parents.
Matthew interviewed for the job with Sean Grace, the sanctuary director at the preserve, and Nash volunteered along with her son, who was only 12 at the time. They worked with campers in the five- to seven-year-old group, she said.
Although Nash is not formally involved in environmental organizations, she says she’s always been interested in the subject. “I’ve never done anything really formal, except picking up trash and making donations to environmental causes,” she says. “Everybody knows that I pick up litter all over town. I just hate litter.”
And now almost her entire family is involved in the camp program in some way. Last summer was the first time she and her son volunteered, and they plan to do so again. Her two youngest sons, Bennett, 11, a student at Millstone River School, and Stephen, 9, a student at the Wicoff School, attended one of the other week-long programs at the camp known as “Woodland Adventures,” in which campers made replica beaver dams, made a visit to an actual beaver dam at the preserve, and walked the outdoor trails, among other activities.
Nash says the summer camp program comes with many great opportunities for children who like to be outdoors, since it hones both their curiosity in things like insects, animals, plants, and other wildlife, through fun activities. But it also gives them a chance to feel motivated and that they can actually make a difference — all while having fun.
“The kids knew more than I did about the insects and plants, and other stuff we had retained,” says Nash.
Nash says the best part of the program is that it’s a small group, which makes the experience more intimate, as the week-long programs (a different program runs each week throughout the summer) have only two classes — one for children in grades one through three, and another for those in grades four through six. Each class, up to 15 kids, has its own instructor, and usually, a college intern and a high school student help with each group. Says Nash: “It’s not a big place where you feel your child might get lost.”
Every week beginning Monday, June 23, different themes are explored. In one week in the 2008 program, called “Digging in the Dirt,” activities for campers in grades one through three include digging up worms, planting seeds, and creating clay pots with the dirt around them. Another week features the theme “All Creatures Big and Small,” in which the campers investigate various animal groups found on the preserve using field guides and collecting nets. Some of the creatures they will explore include insects, birds, and mammals. Other weeks feature a variation of games, crafts, hikes, and nature experiences.
Older students in grades four through six participate in themed weeks as well, including one week known as “Survivor,” in which campers will learn survival skills, including building shelters, procuring food and water, and cooking on a fire or camp stove.
Nash says campers have a cool down period in the middle of the day, get to play games during lunch, and make crafts in the morning (in relation to the week’s theme). On the last day of the “sensory” week, Nash says, she and her son picked wild blueberries with the kids and helped them to make blueberry muffins. “At the end of that week, we felt physically we had been active all week, instead of being at an inside-type of camp.”
Games, including scavenger hunts, “are so good because it helps kids find details in the environment that you just really might overlook,” Nash says.
Nash grew up on Long Island, and her parents — her father is an engineer who works on Wall Street, and her mother was a homemaker — are from Brooklyn. “To them, the environment was the trees in front of the house, and that was it. For me, I never even noticed so many of the things that the kids noticed,” she said of the campers. “Unless it’s an owl or something like a bluebird, I can’t tell the difference between calls apart, but some of the kids really could.”
She remembers when her grandparents used to visit her house on Long Island, and recalls her grandfather “getting excited because he saw a squirrel.” Now, Nash, a school psychologist at Millstone River School, and her husband, Jack Greenberg, an analyst for the state Department of Health and Senior Services, and their three boys live in Plainsboro, where the family moved more than 13 years ago, before Matthew’s birth. She says their location in Plainsboro Village enables them to walk more often and leave their car at home when they need to run to the store.
Because of her job, Nash gets to spend the summers with her children at home. But from volunteering and from seeing how the program is run, she says it is great for those parents who do work over the summer, because it is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. “Your kids are exhausted (when they arrive home), and they’re outside meeting other kids, and it’s in a more intimate setting,” she says. “And you get a full-day camp experience.”
And for Nash, the option of only sending her children to one week at the camp helps avoid conflict with their summer baseball seasons.
“Compared to some of the larger camp situations, where people are coming in big bus loads, you walk in the door and immediately, you’ll see someone who knows you,” she says. “Sometimes you wonder if somebody’s who really good at science is also good at relating to people, especially really young kids, but they’re wonderful,” she says of the instructors.
Plainsboro Preserve, 609-897-9400 or E-mail plainsboro@njaudubon.org. For more information log on to www.njaudubon.org/centers/plainsboro and click on the button for Nature Camps. Each week-long camp is $240, and membership in the Audubon Society is required at a cost of $35.
