MSU offers inclusive summer day camp experience for kids
August 6, 2021
BOZEMAN — A fifth-grade student navigates through an obstacle course on the lawn outside of Reid Hall on the Montana State University campus. He throws a beach ball into a bucket, crawls through a hula hoop and does a quick spin through a jump rope. After completing additional obstacles, he runs to the finish as other kids and adults cheer him on.
The student is one of 10 elementary school-aged children from Bozeman who is participating in the Inclusive Community Camp, held this week on the MSU campus. Now in its second year, the Inclusive Community Camp is a summer day camp that has been carefully designed both for children with additional support needs – including those with Down syndrome and autism – and for those without additional support needs, according to Jody Bartz, assistant professor in the MSU College of Education, Health and Human Development’s Department of Health and Human Development, who created and organizes the camp along with Jamie O’Callaghan from the college’s Department of Education. The camp runs Monday through Friday for three hours each day.
“We’re so excited to have everyone together on campus this year,” Bartz said. “It feels amazing to all be here together and to see these kids doing these activities.”
Also participating in the camp this year are 10 Bozeman-area middle school students who spend part of the week working with MSU education students to develop leadership and mentoring skills and then another part of the week serving as junior camp guides to the elementary school-aged children. MSU assistant teaching professor Marcie Reuer is leading the middle school experience portion of the camp.
This year’s camp has a space theme, O’Callaghan said. Camp organizers partnered with the MSU Science Math Resource Center and the NASA AEROKATS and ROVER Education Network project to design activities for the children. Those activities are focused on science, technology, engineering, mathematics and art and include working on rockets, making kites, and decorating and driving moon rovers.
The MSU education students working at the camp are enrolled in the university’s online Master of Arts in Teaching program. Students in that program who are training to become high school teachers are working with the middle school students, while students seeking to become elementary and middle school teachers serve as camp guides to the elementary-aged campers.
“This camp has a very collaborative, layered, multi-tiered approach to teaching,” Bartz said.
The camp allows the education graduate students to meet the hands-on/practicum educational needs for their programs, while providing them with the opportunity to work with children of different abilities in a fun and experiential setting.
“This is the first field experience for the rural Master of Arts in Teaching pre-service students,” said Liz Green, an MSU doctoral student in curriculum and instruction who is also teaching an education methods course this summer and helping with the Inclusive Community Camp. “This is a chance for them to tailor a curriculum and get to know the kids they’re working with and those kids’ individual needs. We have a plan for each day’s activities, but this experience enables our teacher candidates to practice assessing and changing those plans when needed.”
The Inclusive Community Camp was piloted in summer 2020. It was originally planned as a weeklong summer day camp, but organizers instead held it in a mostly virtual format in 2020 because of COVID-19. Still, whether held in-person or virtually, the need for an inclusive camp in the Gallatin Valley remains the same, Bartz said.
“This experience really fills a void,” Bartz said. “It offers students both with and without disabilities the opportunity to participate in a camp together.”
Dovven Gale, who will be in fifth grade this fall, said his favorite parts of the camp have been playing capture the flag and having snacks. Sam Green, another camper who will also be a fifth grader this fall, enjoyed capture the flag and an activity known as moonballs, where campers measured how high a ball could bounce.
Maggie Stevens, who will be in eighth grade this fall in Bozeman, said she has enjoyed developing her leadership skills and participating in the camp as a junior guide.
“I like building leadership skills and getting to be with kids and helping them through things,” she said. “I like building trust with them and learning how to come together, even when we all have different backgrounds.”
MSU student Madison Longwell, who is enrolled in the online master’s program, is spending the week working with the middle school students. She said she has noticed them being supportive of another.
“They’re really working together as a team,” Longwell said. “It’s been great to see.”
Longwell, who lives in Big Sky, will complete her student teaching in West Yellowstone. She doesn’t have much classroom experience yet, she said, and so one thing that has been helpful is to see firsthand what strategies have worked with the kids, and what hasn’t worked. She also said that the camp provides value beyond the teaching and learning opportunities it enables.
“This camp is just a great opportunity to build community within Bozeman and among different grade levels that might not get to interact with each other,” she said.
Rhonda Voss, an MSU student in the online master’s program, currently teaches science, engineering, art and history with a provisional teaching license to middle school students in Circle. She said she has enjoyed helping the campers throughout the week and has loved observing how bright the kids are.
“They’ve impressed me,” Voss said. “They’re so smart and enthusiastic. I’m excited to go back to Circle and use what I’ve learned here in my classroom.”
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