After the first day or so, children become more comfortable interacting with the city poetically. Some choose to do their own interventions outside of our prompts. This is one of the goals of the camp. The child takes the camp curriculum and starts making it their own. Here are a few examples.

THE MISSING YEARLING

We walk near a well known Denver landmark, Donald Lipski’s The Yearling.

But one summer we noticed that the horse was missing. We speculated why and the children kept thinking about it. On the following day, one of our students made a clay horse and placed it near the chair to keep it company until the original horse returned. Later we found out the horse was being cleaned for the summer.

THE PATH OF SMILES

Coming back from the Denver Art Museum, three girls started to draw smiley faces on the sidewalk as they went. They persisted for 15 blocks. As we arrived at our home base, the faces got more elaborate. At the end, they stopped and drew a detailed face with a full body.