BY TALI ISRAELI
Staff Writer
JEFF GRANIT staff Children in the Marlboro arts and technology camp rehearse with Boom Whackers for an upcoming musical performance. MARLBORO – Students take adventures in learning through hands-on projects involving music, puppet shows and cooking.
Marlboro’s arts and technology camp is an innovative program which offers creative hands-on projects designed to strengthen pupils’ basic skills in math and language arts.
The summer course, which is offered at the Marlboro Memorial Middle School, Nolan Road, is open to children who are in the basic skills program and to those pupils who have been identified through their standardized test scores as needing additional assistance, according to curriculum supervisor Karen Klondek.
The summer camp is a federally funded program that began in the Marlboro K-8 School District in 2001. There are 115 second-, third- and fourth-graders pres-ently enrolled.
The students are divided into 11 groups with two teachers per group; one regular elementary school teacher and one special area teacher such as a music, computer, or physical education instructor.
Klondek said class size is limited to 15 children or fewer.
Camp coordinator Philip Silva said, “Two teachers, small class sizes, positive results.”
The teachers are fantastic, Silva added. He described them as high energy, innovative thinkers, and a staff that understands the pupils and their needs.
According to Silva, each group creates a theme to focus on for the duration of the camp. This year’s overall camp theme is “Adventures in Learning.”
According to Klondek, reading, writing and math skills are integrated into every project the pupils work on. For example, if the project is cooking, the children learn measurements, estimation and fractions.
One group’s area of focus is studying outer space. As part of their adventure in learning the pupils made polygon aliens and constellations, wrote letters to aliens on other planets, created stories about outer space, and learned about distances from the sun to the planets.
The pupils who are being taught this summer by Christine Chaplinski, a middle school art teacher, and Ganna Maymind, a first-grade teacher, are studying the ocean.
Chaplinski said the children are learning about the underwater environment and the four major oceans. Their projects include making Japanese fish printing, researching sea creatures and making puppets. At the end of the camp program the children will put on a puppet show they wrote themselves.
Maymind said the pupils are reading about the ocean, finding the main idea of the stories they read and learning about whale measurements.
“They have fun, they don’t realize they are learning or that it’s work,” Maymind said.
According to Maymind, some of the math skills the pupils are learning include fractions, ruler measurements, telling time and elapsed time.
Language arts skills that are being taught include cause and effect, the main idea of a story, predicting an outcome, graphic organizers and Venn diagrams.
Silva said the goal is to make the program take shape in such a way that the children do not even realize they are learning.
Klondek believes the most important outcome of the program is for the children to discover that learning can be fun. The children who are enrolled in the summer session tend to struggle and fall behind in school; their attitude about learning and about school changes with this program, she said.
While they create projects and learn about different subject areas, the children are being taught more than just math and language arts skills. For example, studying the ocean teaches children about geography and biology and studying outer space teaches students about astronomy.
“The program continuously gets praise and support. It’s a good program,” Klondek said.