CAES at KEEC

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Keewaydin Informational Letter

Dear Parents/Guardians/Friends,
    Our next group of CAES students will attend the Keewaydin Environmental Education Center ( KEEC) the week of May 21st, and although May sounds like it is months away, it is really around the corner when considering our fund raising needs! Many parents who are new to our community may not know much about Keewaydin. This letter will hopefully give parents all the background information necessary to understand the intent of Keewaydin.
    Keewaydin started at Chester-Andover roughly 37 years ago when one of our science teachers decided that a week of learning at an environmental camp would be a wonderful experience for his sixth grade students. Although Bruce Johnson is no longer on our teaching staff, many groups of CAES students have since traveled to Keewaydin on Lake Dunmore to spend a week learning environmental science together. Perhaps you went as a child? As our school changed to multiage classrooms, the Keewaydin experience also changed to encompass both our fifth and sixth graders. Consequently, for the past twelve years, both the fifth and sixth graders of CAES have attended KEEC together in May.
    The physical setting of Keewaydin on Lake Dunmore in Salisbury, Vermont, is simply gorgeous! Surrounded by the beauty of the natural world, KEEC’s program focus is building a community and demonstrating that all living things are interdependent. A crucial aspect of the program is for each child to understand his/her role in the successful functioning of their community. This is why the KEEC program is intentionally residential. The residential experience is critical to the lessons of interdependence the KEEC staff conveys all week. In order to maintain a sense of community, each child is responsible for contributing to the group dynamic. Students grow personally from the need to cooperate with others, while living and working harmoniously in a secure and caring environment. Our students will make new friends and see their teachers and classmates in a new light. Everyone at camp works, studies, eats, and sleeps together.
    Students live in summer cabins with wood stoves installed for spring and fall use. The cabins are safe and comfortable. There are several “female” and several “male” designated cabins. There are also flush toilets and showers available in nearby buildings! We are surely camping, but we are also not in tents!
    Children are under the direct supervision of adults at all times. The school’s teaching staff, because of their familiarity with the children, is responsible for social behaviors of the class. The KEEC staff is composed of skilled naturalists, teachers, and college students studying science. The environment is safe, yet filled with physical challenges for a broad range of learners.
    All students have a job assigned to them and it is a huge aspect of the residential program! Likewise all children are assigned to a study group, and a residential cabin. Each child will have three different groups that they interact with while at KEEC. There are ten different science investigations and children maintain a KEEC journal all week.
    There is a registered nurse available each morning and all KEEC staff have CPR and First Aid certifications. In addition there is a local physician on call for consultations and emergencies. In the event of a serious illness or accident, a CAES staff member would contact a parent immediately. The Porter Medical Center, Middlebury is fifteen minutes away.
            JOIN US ON SEPTEMBER 29TH at 6:30
    We have about eleven thousand dollars left to raise- a lot of money! All parents need to participate in one or more of the various fund raising options in order us to meet our goal. Our initial Keewaydin meeting for all 5/6 parents will be on Thursday, September 29th at 6:30 in the CAES multipurpose room. Your attendance at this meeting is critical so that we can discuss various fund raising ideas and set a calendar of these events for the academic year. We have some great fund raisers to put in place, but we are always looking for new ideas! PLEASE contribute in any way that you can! In the past it seems as if only a handful of the 5/6 students’ parents actively participated. This year’s fee to send one child is $ 225. We have 80 children to date. 11K is a considerable amount of cash that we need to come up with by May 1st. Please do your part! Bring your 5/6 student and join us for a discussion of Keewaydin on Thursday night!

-CHECK OUT THE KEEWAYDIN BLOG CREATED BY MR. KELLOWAY! YOU CAN FIND IT ON THE SCHOOL WEB PAGE. CHECK THERE FOR UPDATES, IMPORTANT DEADLINES, FUND RAISING IDEAS AND MORE. -

    If you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to call me at school: 875-2108 ext 129- Gutierrez or any of the other 5/6 teachers. The busses will be loading on Monday, May 21st for another terrific week of environmental science education and personal growth.

    Thanks for your support! See you soon!

    Frank Kelley, Jeremy Kelloway, Toby Treu, and
    Patricia Weaver-Gutierrez, 2011-12 Coordinator

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Frogging

Here is a new essay from our time at KEEC:

Falling in the Lagoon
by: K.C.
We were at Keewaydin. It was Thursday Choice Day, and for the afternoon I choose frogging. It’s where you go to a lagoon and catch frogs and other amphibians. We took a Keewaydin van to the other side of Lake Dunmore, to where the lagoon was. When we got there Trevor our leader showed us this old, but good conditioned cage where we would put frogs.
Trevor said that we only had a couple nets, so some of us would have to use bare hands. I wanted to go bare-handed. I went to the lagoon, it had a lot of frogs, big and small. I tried catching them but it was hard because I had to go in before I could get close to them, and by then they’d sense me, or see me, whatever little froggies do. Then, I saw this frog, just sitting there, right beside this little chunk of land, floating in the center of the lagoon.
I stepped in. I tried going in quickly over to the frog, it seemed to be working. I went onto the chunk of land. Let me rephrase that, into the land. I flew straight threw the chunk of land. Wait, it wasn’t land it was methane gas, lily pad, and moss stuff. The frog swam away as fast as it could, which was pretty fast. I tried to go after it, but I was stuck.
The bottom of the lagoon engulfed me. I was struggling to get out, but I just kept sinking. After a minute I was just below my knees in mud by a couple inches, when I made my big mistake. I tried to take a big step out when I tripped in the mud and fell face first in mud. Well I would have, but I put out my hands so I’d be able to get out easier, but my face still got a little dirty. My feet were finally free! After about two minutes I struggled out of the lagoon, then I realized I was wearing a white shirt, light jeans, and a white hat.
When I got out I saw C. fell in not to’ far from where I was and almost the exact same thing happened to him, everyone who went frogging came over to try and help him out, he got out in a couple minutes. Then I dropped my hat in a mud pit when we were walking back to the van. C. and I said we were just like Creatures from the Black Lagoon, and we smelled like methane gas, and frog. It was really funny.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Kitchen Duty

One of the jobs kids had at KEEC was dishwasher duty. Here is a student's description:

I was a dishwasher the 2nd half of the week at keec. I worked with a staff member at KEEC named Matt. He was awesome to worked with. I also worked with my classmates Tanner, Mat, Sean, Maddie, Jon , and Riley. We worked in the back of the kitchen. We rotated jobs so we all got to do all the jobs as dishwashers. The good part of being a dishwasher was we got to eat first then do the dishes. The challenging part was the dishes came in fast so we had to work fast. It was a lot of fun!!!

Another job was hopper during meals. Here is a student's description:

Hopper - In this job you work with a lot of people. You have to prepare the tables by getting the food that wasn't kept warm on the tables before everyone arrived. You also had to put out the silverware and the plates and bowls. you work with the chefs and Trevor the chief hopper and assistant director. One of the good parts of being a hopper is that you get to know what you're having before everyone else does. One bad part of being a hopper is that you have to smell the food before you eat it and when you're really hungry that can be a disaster. You have to work at breakfast, lunch, and dinner but you only have to work for half of the week. You only have 15 minutes to get dressed while everyone else gets 30. And you miss some rec time (recess) in the afternoon.

Even more lost photos

Here are some gems from Mrs. G's camera...

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Lost Pictures

When filtering hundreds of pictures it is easy to overlook a few good ones, a few kids get left out of posts, and we had some technical difficulties with one camera that we just got pictures off of today! Here are some, more may be coming!

Natives

One investigation several groups went on was Natives.
"We learned about the Abenaki tribe that used to live in the area around KEEC. Then we learned how to throw a spear with an item called an Atl-atl (sp?). Later we hiked out to an area in the woods where there was a native American camp set up. We learned how to make fire using a bow drill and cedar and birch bark to start a fire"