Published: June 25, 2009 09:48 pm      

Fun and learning

Summer program differs from usual classroom experience

CATLETTSBURG — Short sessions. Intense instruction. Fun with a purpose.

The summer session for elementary pupils at Catlettsburg Elementary School is not much like what they see in the classroom the rest of the year.

The theme is global, with each of eight teachers choosing a country and crafting lessons and activities fitting the nationality, said Terri Spurlock, director of the 21st Century Community Learning Center at the school.

So the children make pinatas in Mexico, castles in England and boats in Jamaica.

All the activities are tied in with math and reading, the most essential subjects under state and federal accountability requirements.

But the program, which is open to all elementary students in the Boyd County district, goes further than that. It has implemented the STEM concept — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — the four-pronged approach increasingly seen as most likely to produce graduates ready to compete in tomorrow’s labor market.

The most visible symbol of the STEM emphasis was the airplane in the Catlettsburg gymnasium Wednesday. Constructed by its junior engineers of the most modern aircraft-grade cardboard and duct tape, the plane was big enough to fit maybe 10 children in its packing-box fuselage.

Its stubby corrugated cardboard wings and propellor may not have had aerodynamic properties sufficient to get it into the air, but that wasn’t the point. Rather, the plane, and smaller models the children made from pencil boxes and paper scraps, lifted their imaginations into the stratosphere.

“When you use your imagination, you can see different things,” said Chloe Napier, who was helping Autumn Fields and Rebekah Badgett decorate the plane’s wings with colored markers.

Napier and Fields are going into the fourth grade at Catlettsburg and Badgett will be a third-grader at Summit Elementary.

“We studied all the pieces of the plane. Once you know the pieces, you can make the plane,” said Chris Rice, who will be in fifth grade this fall at Summit Elementary.

The next time Rice and his classmates go to the airport, they’ll be able to point out the stabilizers, rudder, flaps and other parts on the jet planes taking off and landing, and explain how they keep the plane stable in flight.

The smaller planes the children made served to link the eight “countries” they were studying, via imaginary globe-hopping flights.

Napier, Fields and Badgett liked England the best. “You get to dress up as a princess,” Badgett explained.

She also translated a few British terms — lift and flat, for instance — that Americans know better as elevator and apartment.

Johns Hopkins University, which funded the program, is studying it as a model for similar programs, said Norma Meek, a district administrator. An evaluation team from the university visited the school Tuesday to see it in action.

The secret, Meek said, is to make the program unlike school. “If kids don’t succeed in class, why go through four weeks of the same in the summer?”

A similar program will be conducted at Boyd County Middle School.

MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.