The lights are low. Crickets are chirping. Inside the tents, light flickers, casting shadows on the walls. School librarian Shaye Miller smiles at the students, who are clustered excitedly around her.
“We’re at a campground with other schools,” she tells them in a hushed tone. “They have to go to bed — but we get to stay up past midnight, as long as we’re reading quietly with our flashlights.”
It isn’t a sleepaway camp — it’s the reading campground in the library at David Crockett Elementary School in Weatherford, Texas, outside of Dallas. Miller implemented the campground last fall, after the students finished the library orientation, to help them adjust to using the library and encourage them to read.
Camp Crockett
The idea of a reading campground wasn’t new to the school. “Our previous librarian set up a group of tents in the library, and the kids loved it. They did flashlight reading and had a blast,” Miller says. “I decided I would do that. I just did my own spin on it, and it was just phenomenal.
Miller wanted the experience to begin the moment the students walked into the library. She set up 13 tents in the main area for students to use, along with a display in the entryway, complete with fishing poles, a kayak, a pine tree, a tackle box, an archery target, a fishing hat, a net and an old lantern.
“The first thing they see when they come in is all this camping equipment, plus cricket sounds and a crackling fire, from a TV that’s covered,” Miller says. All students receive a flashlight to use in the library. “The lights are dim. They get to take flashlights to pick out their books and use them inside the tents.”
Each tent is outfitted with log pillows and a faux campfire. Miller found pretzel-shaped pillows at Target for $5 each, and her library volunteer offered to turn them into logs.
“In 24 hours, she brought me 24 logs,” Miller says. “The kids use them as pillows – they lie back or lean forward on them. They turned out much cuter than I even imagined.”
Miller’s mother made “campfires” for the students to use inside the tents. “You can buy campfires, but they’re so expensive,” says Miller. Her mother glued red, yellow and orange tissue paper around clear plastic cups, then set a flicker light underneath it. She finished the cup with logs she made from construction paper.
“She made beautiful campfires for the kids,” Miller says. “I had to remind them that there was nothing hot about them at all. They’re just for decoration.”
Miller estimates the total cost of the campground was between $400-450. The PTA contributed about $300 for the project. DIYing the log pillows and faux campfires helped keep costs down. “If you bought those logs pre-made, that’s a lot of money,” she says. “I would think you need to be looking at $500 or so.”
Miller credits her principal, Dr. Michelle Stapp, with supporting the project. “She believes very strongly in a library program, and she’s given me a lot of autonomy here in the library,” Miller says. “I know not everybody has that, which makes me sad, but she’s very supportive of the library.”
Campground rules
The campground ran for three weeks, and each class visited at least twice. She kept the rules simple.
Two students per tent. Teachers paired up students to share a tent — usually reading partners — with one log pillow per student. A handful of students preferred to be on their own. “Sometimes they didn’t want to be with a partner,” says Miller. “I had 13 tents, so as long as only two or three wanted their own tent, it worked.”
No tent hopping. Once students chose a tent, it was theirs for as long as they were in the library. “There’s no tent hopping,” says Miller. “There’s no ‘I want a pink one. No, I want a blue one. I’ll get in a green one.’ Once they picked a tent, that was it.”
Respect the tent and each other. Tent doors had to remain open, and students had to be courteous to one another. “If they disrupted other readers, they would have to come out and sit on the carpet. No one wanted to have to do that, so they worked hard to work it out,” Miller says.
Mission accomplished
Students embraced the campground, says Miller.
“Many of them have told me that this is their favorite class of the week,” Miller says. “When you dim the lights and have those soothing sounds, there’s such a peace. We don’t get to spend a whole lot of time outdoors, and just the feeling of being outside is a good one for the kids. It provides some peace.”
Parents and staff were enthusiastic about the campground, says Miller.
“Whenever the school did a post on Facebook showing a video clip, parents were talking about how excited their child was, that they came home talking about it,” Miller says. After a conference day at the school, a teacher reached out to Miller to share compliments she had heard. “She told me, ‘You just need to know a lot of parents stopped by the library to step inside and see what it looked like, and they said so many wonderful things!’
These responses indicate that the campground did more than just give students a fun experience, according to Miller. It helped change how students, parents and teachers view the library.
“It frames the library in the way we want it to be — comforting, peaceful, relaxing, fun,” says Miller. “Very often libraries are the babysitting area where you just drop your kids off and leave. We don’t do that here at Crockett. Teachers come in and stay. They are part of the learning experience.”