Camp Classen

Oakridge Sixth Grade is headed to Camp Classen
September 22-26, 2025

What is Camp Classen?

The Outdoor School at YMCA CAMP CLASSEN is the most unique program of its kind. It is both easily accessible from main highways and a reasonable distance for many schools in Oklahoma and Texas and covers 2,400 extraordinary acres in the Arbuckle Mountains. The camp’s facilities are designed to accommodate multiple student ages and needs at the same time.Our ecological diversity is a treasure in itself. Between its lakes, mountain tops, streams, fields, and waterfalls - the Eastern forest biome interlaces with that of the Western plains. This diversity and natural beauty make it ideally suited for hands-on, place-based learning. Its facilities are not only tuned to complement and support academic programs, but to promote and encourage leadership, teamwork, value training, trust, self worth and understanding for students.

CAMP CLASSEN's Outdoor School offers outdoor education programs for schools from Oklahoma and Texas. Teachers can take their classes on guided interpretive hikes focusing on geology, ecology, biomes, natural cycles, and fossils. Our place-based education programs include a ready-for-use curriculum for teachers, including geology, ecology, adaptation, water, predator prey studies, fresh water labs, fossil labs, orienteering and so much more!

Our Outdoor School empowers teachers to take their classroom outside, allowing them to connect with their students and create memories to last a lifetime. Activities are hands-on and place-based, so students are not only learning key concepts, but relating it to very specific events of the real world.

We believe that the teacher is an essential building block in the acquisition of knowledge. It’s their presence within the Outdoor School’s instruction that connect school concepts - to life learning - to retained knowledge. For this, we provide great facilities with a comprehensive range of curriculum and program support for you and a pricing scale that cannot be matched! 

Whether you call it environmental education, experiential education, outdoor education, hands on learning, place-based studies or just camp - our goals are the same:

1. To help you promote the greatest retention of knowledge possible 
2. For students to enjoy learning and become lifelong learners 
3. To give students concrete examples that apply to classroom learning 
4. To promote sustainable, responsible stewardship of the environment / to make environmental decisions based on the big picture & the good of our civilization. 
5. To help students value themselves, others, and their environment 

Forms for Oakridge Sixth Graders and Parents attending Camp Classen 2024 are listed below.