So I had my son home from elementary school for most of this week because it was thanksgiving. And since I’m home all the time, it was time to do something together. Yay! I recently gave a presentation to the scout troop on shelters, and of course I presented the debris hut as the basic. But it occured to me I’d never built one. So I asked my son if he wanted to build a “leaf house”. He was all for it!
Wenesday turned out to be too rainy to work, but on thanksgiving we put one togther at my mothers house, under the guise of rakinng the yard for her. MMy sister has some pictures of that, if I can get them I’ll post them here. There was a big log to work with, and a small brushpile next to the pond that provided good thin supports, but there was no real good ridgepole, so we made something big enough for my son but way to small for me. He crawled in and out several times and pulled the whole family out to see. He didn’t do much work himself but watched very excitedly.
The next day we built one in our own backyard. Around my place a tree had recently dropped a limb or two, so there was a great big pile of branches by the side of he road. One good ridgepole and a few good supports were fished out, as well as a number of branches. Additionally, our neighborhood has us rake our leaves into the street for the streetsweeper to get, so a tremendouss amount of raw material was simply by the side of the road. This time we could build something big enough for both of us, and he really go into it.
We finished around 1 in the afternoon, and after playing in it, I was ready to go back inside. My son, however, wasn’t, and went back out to play. He asked to take a pillow and blanket out, and I told him no because I didn’t want them to get dirty. But he snuck them out past me, as well as his two favorite dino books and a pair of pajamas. When I went out to check on him I found he’d moved into it!
I have no pictures of it yet, but I’ve left it up in the backyard. We might spend the night out in it if we get another warm, dry day soon. I don’t want his first night camping to be a miserable night, and he does get asthma attacks this time of year. Or I’ll knock it down and we’ll build another in the spring. Point is, we had fun practicing survival skills together. A debris hut is a suitable project for kids as young as 4. If you’ve got any kids you like to spend time with, I higly reccommend it for an afternoon acivity.
