Exploring heritage and history
Public school students use summer break to learn about region’s past
Ernesto “Chito” Valencia ran his fingers over the wool fabrics hanging on the wall in one of the adobe structures at El Rancho de las Golondrinas in Santa Fe, a big crate of wool sitting at his feet. The touch of the textile and scent of the wool brought back memories of his grandparents, who used to tend sheep in Northern New Mexico.
The experience made the seventh-grade student from Amy Biehl Community School reflect on the hardships they must have faced. “A lot of kicks and head butts,” he said with a smile. “Imagine how painful that would be.”
His trip to the living history museum on the south side of town as part of a summer program called Hands on Heritage was just one hands-on lesson in the culture, mores and history of Northern New Mexico. For Valencia, the program provides an invaluable lesson.
“I love to learn where my place is, about where I live,” he said.
He is not alone. About 115 public school students in grades four through eight are taking part in the five-week session, which provides project-based, hands-on learning experiences to teach them about the region’s agriculture, architecture, cooking traditions and prehistoric life, among other topics. The students also read — with the middle school students acting as tutors for the younger children — and apply math and science skills to such projects as a robotics competition.
Hands on Heritage provides at least two field trips per week for the students. And that’s something, many of the kids in the program said, they don’t experience much during the school year.
That’s no surprise. A number of recent studies have reported the slow decline of field trips, a byproduct of ever-tightening school budgets and the need to prepare for testing.
“We don’t have the time, and we don’t have the money,” said Alma Rodriguez, an Aspen Community Magnet School teacher and one of the coordinators of the program, of the reasoning behind the drop in field trips during the school year.
Hands on Heritage, she said, is thus doubly importantly because, “It is not like learning history in the classroom. It’s about learning history outside.”
This summer the Hands on Heritage students visited museums, hiking trails and historical sites that, many of them said, they had never been to before.
And they learned what Aspen Community seventh grader Misty Reed called, “Fun, weird facts.” She, for example, learned through a hands-on exercise how Spanish colonialists made Yucca rope to lasso a horse. (She made a Yucca braid for herself in the process.) Fourth-grader Giovanni Chavez said he learned that the roadrunner is New Mexico’s state bird. Valentina Hussey, a Wood Gormley fourth-grader, said she found an array of pollinators, including butterflies and bees, during a science-driven visit to Frenchy’s Field.
The older kids read New Mexican author Rudolfo Anaya’s coming-of-age story Bless Me Ultima and also saw the New Mexico-lensed film version. The younger kids learned that the Jurassic-era plant eating dinosaur Seismosau-rus once roamed what is now New Mexico, and that it stretched, from head to toe, from La Madera Street (where Aspen Community Magnet School is located) to St. Francis Drive.
They all visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and studied her life and work and then created their own drawings based on her artistic style.
They also learned about the origins of their family names and studied their family’s crest coat of arms.
“We learned how we got to be here,” Reed said.
The grant-driven summer-enrichment program started five years ago as an extension of an after-school program that once took place at Kaune Elementary School. Former board member Susan Duncan served as a driving force behind the program, and it works out of both Aspen Community School and El Camino Real Academy.
Duncan said she helped start the program because she saw a scarcity of high-quality summer programs for upper-elementary school and middle-school students.
El Camino Real history teacher Ed Gorman said the summer program not only reinforces learning skills the kids pick up during the course of a normal school year, but it extends those lessons into New Mexico’s history.
“I believe social studies gets put on the back burner a lot these days, because it’s not tested,” he said as he led students around El Rancho de las Golondrinas. “Something like this helps kids get out and learn about New Mexico’s culture and history, to learn about this wonderful melting pot that New Mexico is.”
It also serves to keep kids from becoming couch potatoes in front of the television set all day. Perla Carrillo Arias, a Capital High School 10th-grader who mentors the kids in the program, marveled at the many activities her younger charges got involved in within the span of five weeks.
“Most of my summer childhood was spent at home doing nothing but watching TV,” she said.
Students pay $100 to $200 each, depending on their economic status, which includes four and a half days of programming each week plus breakfast and lunch every day. There are full and partial scholarships available as well. Parents and students interested in next year’s program should contact Ed Gorman at El Camino Real Academy at 505-467-1300 or Alma Rodriguez at Aspen Community Magnet School at 505-467-4500.
This year’s program ends on Thursday, July 27.