This month flew by with fun outdoor activities including biking and visiting the local bike store to learn about safety, swimming and sand castle building, touring the 4-H buildings at the local county fair, learning to use a compass to find treasures around the park, making twine the way Native Americans did using native nettle plants, more campfire cooking, making homemade “football” icecream we had to toss around to get to thicken, and many fun outdoor games.
Although we kicked off the summer in St. Charles with around 70 youth, we are now down to about 30 kids who attend regularly. In Plainview, we still have a strong 40 kids participating, many of whom are Latino children from the local trailer park.
I have found that about 95% of the kids in Project GO are not involved in any other out-of-school or extracurricular activities. So besides getting kids excited about being outdoors, Project GO is also providing a great opportunity for kids to strengthen their social relationships, develop leadership skills, acquire new interests and hobbies and to interact with caring adult mentors.
June has been an exciting month! The St. Charles Project GO summer program kicked off with just over 75 kids registered. In Plainview, we started with just over 30 and the program continues to grow there.
We have enjoyed a variety of fun outdoor summer activities including stream exploring, campfire cooking, learning how to set up a tent, campfire stories, group challenge games, fish printing, gardening and nature scavenger hunts.
It is great to see the diversity of children signing up for the program. We now have kids ages 4 - 16 registered as well as children from a variety of different ethic and economic backgrounds.
The summer will be over before we know it with all of the fun times with new friends that we have planned for the coming weeks!
