MICHAEL KELLY The Marietta Times Students play hopscotch during an outdoor break at the Marietta College Summer Reading Camp outside Erwin Hall on Wednesday.

The daily camp is three morning hours of end-to-end reading and hands-on things to do for the 54 kindergarten-to-grade-six aged students. On Wednesday morning, after a session at the college planetarium, the younger students played hopscotch and drew chalk art outside Erwin Hall, then retired indoors to make wearable rockets out of cardboard boxes. Teacher Carole Hancock required a password starting with the letter ‘B’ as each approached the doorway.

“Beehive!” she exclaimed as one whispered to her. “That’s a good one.”

Upstairs in a classroom decorated with trees and other visual cues to the place where Robot Roz had landed in “The Wild Robot” by Peter Brown, the group set to work repurposing cardboard boxes into rockets.

River Brooks, a 6-year-old from Marietta, made early headway in rocket design, with the opening flaps as wings. Drawing controls onto a panel with crayons and bingo markers, he said, “I’m making a Christmas tree on it, and I need some yellow. Does it need a black button?”

MICHAEL KELLY The Marietta Times Instructor Raven Cromwell helps a student designing a box rocket on Wednesday during the Marietta College Summer Reading Camp. The three-week camp attracted 54 students this year.

Nearby, Roran Henderson, another 6-year-old Marietta resident, indicates a cardboard rudder duct-taped to the back of his rocket.

“See how it works?” he said, flexing the scored panel side to side, then opening and closing his rocket-box using duct-tape hinges.

“I could put my stuffed animals in it, and my Lego men,” he said.

As for robots, “I build them all the time using my Legos,” he said.

In “The Wild Robot,” Roz crashes onto an uncharted island and needs to adapt to survive among the animals and in the unfamiliar surroundings she encounters.

“It’s got so many good themes,” said Hancock, who is camp co-director and a retired teacher, while watching the students go to town on the cardboard. “Ecology, science, making friends, dealing with bullies, interdependence. We have one theme each week: plants and seeds last week, space and planets this week, robots and inventions next week.”

It is the thematic material and related activities that keeps the students on track, occupied and interactive, she said.

“They’re engaged, all the time,” said Raven Cromswell, co-director and Marietta College education professor. “The goal is to get that interest, and then motivation to read.”

Hancock said the camp ran from 1992, when it was founded by Dottie Erb, now on the education faculty at the college, but was interrupted for the past three years because of a change in the requirements related to using college students as teachers in the camp.

“It started out to help kids who needed assistance with their reading skills, but now it’s for enrichment and development. The main thing is to get them excited about books and reading. We choose a central text, like ‘The Wild Robot,’ and everything branches out from that,” Erb said after dropping in on the rocket-building event.

Hancock said the student applicants are assessed for abilities in advance of the camp, which is separated into three groups by age. Each child receives a bag of books, worth about $70, custom tailored for their reading proficiency, which they take home and keep.

Hancock said the college was able to offer the camp again after a three-year hiatus thanks to grants from local organizations that cover the cost of paying teachers and purchasing materials. The college is considering starting an endowment to fund the project from year to year. It can change the lives of its students, she said.

“It provides the spark that makes the difference,” she said.

Information on supporting the camp, which at one time enrolled more than 100 students, is available at the Marietta College Office of Advancement at 740-376-4709.

Marietta College Summer Reading Camp

• Established more than 25 years ago.

• Held mornings, five days a week for three weeks.

• Designed to engage students with activities on themes related to a book.

• 2019 camp studies “The Wild Robot” by Peter Brown.

Source: Marietta College Summer Reading Camp.