Glen Ellyn teachers turn back clock for writing camp

Picture a one-room schoolhouse atop a little hill covered in wildflowers, the sounds of a creek.

Feel that? The blood pressure dropping. There's probably a content grin on your face.

That's exactly how Pat HarteNaus looks when she starts talking about the limestone schoolhouse near Galena in northwest Illinois, the setting for her children's book series and a summer writing camp she hosts with fellow teachers from Lincoln Elementary in Glen Ellyn.

Students stay for three days and turn back the clock to a simpler time.

“They sit there and hear the birds, just the noises of nature while they're writing,” said Kelley Vail, one of the literacy teachers who leads the camp.

They have one strict rule: papers and pencils only, please.

“There's definitely no Wi-Fi,” said a laughing Kathleen Brennan, another Lincoln co-worker.

The group of 16 kids begins the day at 9 a.m., hiking up the hill to the Belden School, originally opened in 1859. Teachers shuffle out the parents who don't want to leave. And the students, heading into third and eighth grades, jostle over who gets to ring the bell.

“I think they're so amazed that school used to happen like this,” teacher Kim Mason said.

But more than the charm and novelty of a one-room school, there's serious work at hand. Teachers are molding young students into authors. Students are gaining the confidence that comes from creating. And kids are learning what it means to build character.

“We're not just here to teach reading and writing and math,” Mason said. “We're building young adults. We're building little people that need to be respectful and kind and responsible and have good manners, and Patti does a really great job with that.”

If that seems like an impossible task over three days, the teachers say they work one-on-one with the students.

“We don't often get the opportunity to work with such a small group of children and really just working on making a fun story because of some of the demands of our curriculum,” Brennan said. “So just having them write a fun book is kind of a nice treat for us.”

The lessons also stick because of HarteNaus' credibility as an author herself. She shows them rough drafts of her Belden Boy series, with a third book due out early next year from the perspective of a school bully.

Her books are carefully researched, inspired in part by the interviews she's done with alumni of Belden, a school until 1943, and ledgers found by a farmer before the building was restored.

The history buff donated proceeds from the sales of her first two books to the yearslong project to restore Belden from a “broken-down” school ransacked by vandals to what it once looked in its heyday.

“She really has a knack for the historical perspective on things,” Brennan said. “She ties that in and really draws kids' interest into the stories she's telling.”

Because of the demand — popularity is growing through word-of-mouth — they hope to offer two camps next summer. Registration starts in April and costs $300 for three-days of lessons, picnics, T-shirts and a hard copy of the short stories students have written and illustrated.

By the end of the camp, the four teachers know they've made an impact by the themes of the books. Most involve friendship and inclusion, HarteNaus said.

“A story is ever-present all the time,” she said.