Survival camp: wilderness skills for children in the Saxon forest

The camp teaches the groundwork of surviving comfortably outdoors, and it teaches it by doing. The techniques strand covers building a shelter, lighting a fire, making a water filter, finding the way in open country with map and compass, tying knots and building a bridge. A safety strand covers first aid outdoors, building a stretcher, how to behave in an emergency, and signalling by morse and distress signs. A third strand is adventure education: handling a carving knife and wood, making things from natural materials, geocaching and watching the stars. The operator supplies the adventure-education materials and the equipment, and trained staff lead and run each activity.

The stay runs seven travel days with six nights. Accommodation in a multi-bed room with bed linen, full board with breakfast, lunch and dinner and drinks round the clock, professional leadership of the activities, the adventure-education materials and equipment, and supervision of participants by day and by night are all included. The operator states that its price covers all the listed services with no separate service or handling fee, and that its own booking terms form part of the trip.

Children sleep in bungalows on the grounds of the holiday centre, in rooms of four to six beds, with bed linen provided. Girls and boys sleep separately. Each bungalow has a counsellor's room of its own, so that staff are close to the children at night as well. The washing facilities are a short distance from the bungalows.

Three full meals a day. Breakfast and dinner are served as a buffet and lunch is a hot meal, with drinks available round the clock. For a day trip the group is given food to take along.

The programme itself is the activity: shelters, fires, water filters, navigation, knots and bridge building, with first aid, stretchers, morse and distress signals on the safety side. Around it come carving with knife and wood, making things from natural materials, geocaching and stargazing. Adventure-education games are built in deliberately, because the obstacles the group keeps running into are exactly what those games are there to work on.

The centre stands on eight hectares with a great deal of woodland and room enough for children to roam and play. The ground borders the Braunsteich lake directly, and the forest continues beyond the site, much of it under nature protection. Children are housed in bungalows, meals come from the centre's own kitchen, and the grounds include a swimming pool and open pitches.

This is a camp for a child who would rather make something work than be entertained. A shelter either keeps the rain off or it does not; a fire either lights or it does not; and a group that cannot agree does not get its bridge built. That is the point of running it as adventure education: willingness to compromise, trust and the ability to handle a disagreement are not lectured about here but needed, repeatedly, by children who are learning them from each other in a forest.