Keeping busy at summer school
Amargosa Creek Middle School students enjoy variety of activities
LANCASTER — Students enrolled in the summer school program at Amargosa Creek Middle School built paper counterweight trebuchets, designed and built water slides from colorful pool noodles.
Students in social studies teacher Chris Becker’s class learned about medieval history and built counterweight trebuchets.
Incoming seventh-grader Christian Jones, 12, showed off his trebuchet. He colored the base of the model in his favorite colors, green, black and red.
“It works by an arm, a basket and a sling with a projectile inside it,” Christian said.
Becker took his students outside the classroom to demonstrate how a large wooden trebuchet works. They launched water balloons and an orange onto the empty concrete quad.
“It combines the force of a catapult with the physics of a sling, so it will launch further, harder. You get a lot more power, plus its using weight so it’s gravity instead of tension,” Becker said.
Becker also enjoyed the summer school program.
“I was asked to teach a GATE academy class,” he said. “I do a little bit of this during the year but not enough to make me happy.”
Student Lucy Chaney, who will enter the eighth grade next school year, said she signed up for summer school because she wanted to learn about medieval history.
“When I was younger my dad
used to watch history shows about medieval times and what happened in there,” Lucy said. “When I grow up I want to be a history teacher, actually. I’m having a good time.”
Incoming seventh-grader J’quan Knight, 13, said he would recommend summer school because you get to throw things and destroy things, in reference to the trebuchet.
Student Landen Green, 12, who will enter the seventh grade next month, said he wanted to go to summer school to play basketball.
In teacher Rebecca Purcell’s class, dubbed To Infinity and Beyond, students used math to better understand their world. The first week students focused on animation. The second week they used art and math. In week three the students focused on gaming, using anything from card games to sports. For the final week of summer school the students worked with computer science.
The boys and girls did a couple of problem-solving activities on Monday using pixel art and playing with simple coding.
“What’s wonderful about summer school for me is that we don’t have the pressure to stay on pace,” Purcell said. “We can explore, and it’s amazing. … We were playing games that they never played before, even checkers, and then showing them the math behind it.”
Seventh-grader Carlo Ramirez made a water slide with pool noodles. He said the most difficult part of the project was designing supports for the slide.
“It was nice. It was better than being inside playing video games,” Carlo said.
Kingston Rhaburn, who will enter the eighth grade next school year, said his mother made his go to summer school. He enjoyed it because he got to do projects such as design and build a water slide.
“I thought it was going to be a lot of homework and like writing stuff,” Kingston said.
Teacher Jennifer Sloan said she buys about 25 pool noodles each year for summer school. Last year’s students used them for an obstacle course for drones.
Teacher Jose Rivas mixed math and art for different architecture projects. The students designed taco trucks, a bridge, and a zoo or theme park. For the final week’s project they designed a city.
“All of these assignments require them to find the perimeter of the area. We also worked on budgeting,” Rivas said.
“My parents made me do it. This is my first time going to summer school so I was pretty excited,” student Ajohn Trinh-Nguyen said.
An estimated 1,000 students signed up for Lancaster School District’s Summer of Exploration. The program was open to students who will enter first through eighth grades when school begins in August.
Four school sites hosted summer school program this year. Amargosa Creek hosted the middle school program. Discovery, Miller and West Wind elementary schools also hosted programs.