The Central Enrichment Summer Adventures Program is designed to combine experiential learning and fun for fifth through eighth grade students in a five week, full-day program. The classes listed below are examples of the 30 innovative classes currently offered to 350 students during this summer session. The program is one of five pilot sites throughout California designed to create "a new vision for summer learning."   

• Goldberg Technology. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) learning is fun in the summer. This class combines math, science and technology to create giant domino effects by combining multiple apparatus and interactions in a single machine. One day, for example, the apparatus might start with the dropping of a ball and 16 movements later a light bulb illuminates.
• Survivor Man. This wilderness survival class teaches students how to primitively build a fire, develop a water filtration system, find supplies around them, and learn how to determine directions from their surroundings.
• Rockets. Students learn about aeronautics while conducting experiments, building rockets from kits, learning about forces, and launching their rockets into space.
• Music Video Maker. Taught by a video production specialist and a dance instructor from Los Angeles, this class combines instruction in urban dance, choreography, theme development and video production to create a student dance video.
• Fit Eating. How can fifth through eighth grade students learn to eat right and prepare their own meals? The Fit Eating class teaches them how to put something together when there seems to be nothing in the kitchen, make smart food choices and how to cook with basic ingredients.
• Robot Chicken. Students create stop-motion animation films by taking photographs of three-dimensional action figures one motion and frame at a time. The class incorporates technology, creative storyboarding, photography, and smiles.
• The Didge Life. A didge (or didgeridoo) is a wind instrument, or aerophone, used by indigenous Australians and developed more than 1500 years ago.  Now popular today around the world, didge comes to Central’s summer program. Students learn the culture, art, musicality and performance of didge while painstakingly crafting their own instruments.
• Literacy Campfire.  Campfire is a 40-minute enrichment block after lunch devoted to activities inspired by Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.  Campfire skits, program-wide competitions and art projects are just a few examples of activities in addition to reading and summarizing chapters of the book.  Core academic concepts from each chapter, such as play on words, are emphasized through creative activities.  

Friday Adventures
Fridays at the Central Enrichment program were dedicated to adventures outside the classroom and the school site, where academic content continued to be disguised within hands-on activities. Many of the students indicated that they had never participated in such activities as fishing, canoing, bike trail riding, building an aqueduct, nature studies, visiting the courthouse, learning about local cultural monuments, and more. Three of the five excursions are summarized below.

• Civic and Cultural Connections Day in Downtown Fresno.  Students met at City Hall in the morning, then embarked on an eight-station tour of downtown Fresno with GPS systems in hand. Brief presentations were given to inspire students by Sheriff Margaret Mims and police officer Rich Hill at Eaton Plaza; at the Fresno County Public Library; by county courthouse officials in a courtroom; at three different cultural leader statues in courthouse park; at the Veterans Memorial Museum; at the Fresno County Office of Education; and welcomed at Chukchansi Park for lunch and multicultural entertainment.
• Millerton Lake and Recreational Center.  The Millerton trip was an outstanding way for students to learn about lakes, water safety and local wildlife. Their excursion included a boat tour, a geocashing activity, park ranger pelt presentation, beach games and recreational activities, and a healthy lunch.
• Adventure Race at Woodward Park.  With the help of a variety of community organization partners, student teams raced to a finish line while participating in stations that challenged them with wilderness survival, water conservation, decoding nautical messages, obstacle courses, fishing, teambuilding, innovative thinking and problem-solving activities.

The Central Enrichment Summer Adventures program is a partnership among Central Unified School District, the Fresno County Office of Education and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The program is supported by additional partners including Central Valley Children's Partnership/Central Valley Afterschool Foundation, Fresno County Public Library, San Joaquin River Parkway, City of Fresno, Fresno PARCS, California State Parks, United Black Men, California Teaching Fellows Foundation, Center for Multicultural Cooperation and a host of other business and community organizations.

For more information and photos, log on to www.centralsummerenrichment.schools.officelive.com