Community Stories
“[Prairie and Wood] wasn’t an accident . . . we put a lot of intellectual and heartfelt time and energy into creating that.”
“I remember going out and digging wild ginger and making ginger cookies with the kids . . . We would play this game called Wolves and Rabbits where the kids would make arrows or draw arrows, make them out of sticks, and the rabbits would hide behind a bush or something and we would go . . . It was a good way of getting kids to wander longer distances there. ”
“One summer—I think probably my first summer—there was a group that did Prairie and Wood, which was a little natural history camp for kids. So I did Prairie and Wood one summer . . . [and] interacting that way I met other Carleton students I didn’t know.”
“This summer, one of the summers I spent in Northfield, kind of between my junior and senior years, I ran the Prairie and Wood Day Camp, which operated out of the Arb Office. And that was for elementary school aged kids in Northfield as a six-week long summer camp that I ran that in that summer. So it was a lot of this outdoor-learning and nature exploration for school kids.”
“[Living in Farm House] was great . . . We made our own bread every week. We made our own yogurt. In the spring, we would start a garden, and then people that stayed over during the summer for the Prairie and Wood program would keep the garden going and stuff. And it was fun.”
“We took them out into the Arboretum and did walks and showed them the little things that we had discovered and just tried to get them used to being out there and overcome their fears. That was a lot of what I think was involved with them: showing that out here, things that you might think are squishy and gross are actually normal and just the way the world works.”
“there was a group that did Prairie and Wood, which was a little natural history camp for kids. So I did Prairie and Wood one summer. So interacting that way I met other Carleton students I didn’t know, doing that.”
Prairie and Wood, 1986. Carleton Archives.
Prairie and Wood, 1995. Rachel and Anna pose for a picture with camper Ben Oney.
Rachel Bynum ‘95 with a potato print shirt made at her Prairie and Wood Summer Camp cohort in 1994
Prairie and Wood, 1995.