The Theme Is Alive as Summer-School Kids Have a Blast

As several hundred space cadets watched, a Red Dart rocket hissed off the launching pad and streaked upward into the gray sky of Oceanside.

A cheer went up as “Admiral” Joe Stephens, a fifth-grade teacher, announced that the craft had just set a height record for rockets launched from this particular Mission Control: an estimated 1,200 feet.

At the rocket’s apogee, a tiny parachute popped open and the spent missile floated to the playground below--avoiding the fate of the previous record holder, which landed on Mission Avenue and was crushed beneath the wheels of a cement truck.

Districts Attempt to Add Pep

Welcome to “theme” summer school, the latest attempt by several school districts throughout San Diego County to put more pep into their summer offerings, particularly for elementary-school students.

It is an approach favored by districts whose summer programs are not geared primarily to remedial work and where the tab is being paid by lottery funds. Such funds allow more flexibility in dispensing the state-approved curriculum.

In the Encinitas elementary district, the theme this summer was the Olympics. Teachers in La Mesa and Spring Valley could choose among several themes, including oceanography, famous people, travel, sports and space.

In Poway, different schools adopted different themes--among them, sites in San Diego, celebration of the Constitution, and critters and creatures.

“We want students to come to a setting with a celebration atmosphere rather than a dull, academic approach,” said Mike Fickel, director of pupil personnel services in the Poway district.

The largest use of a single-theme approach has been in the Oceanside Unified School District, which had 4,300 students enroll for summer school this year.

Instruction at all six Oceanside schools offering summer classes--four elementary, one middle school and one high school--has centered on space exploration. Space supplanted oceanography, the theme for the previous two summers.

At Mission Elementary School, summer Principal Josh Rosado organized a mass rocket launching Thursday, both to cap the four-week program (which ends today) and to give a final boost to classroom lectures and experiments about combustion, thrust, velocity, wind currents and more.

The goal is to stress the space theme in all lesson plans--not just science and mathematics but also reading, writing and art.

“A theme allows teachers to focus their lessons and provides the students an enrichment that is not available during the regular year,” Rosado said.

Students performed flight experiments with homemade kites and wind experiments with bubbles. Each classroom at Mission had a bilingual aide for the one-third of the students, mostly Latino, who speak only limited English.

“The principal kept the theme consistent,” said third-grade teacher Mary Nash, whose son David, 12, built the rockets. “Students were space cadets, teachers were space instructors. He even sent us space memos, ‘Please take your cadets to the launch site. . . . ‘ “

How Far to the Stars?

Space journals were kept, solar system dioramas and space-shuttle models were constructed, and math skills were polished by calculating distances between stars. Younger students read “Mr. Henry the Astrocat.”

There were field trips to the HMS Beagle replica at Dana Point (a holdover from the oceanography theme) and the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center in Balboa Park. A Navy fighter pilot from Miramar Naval Air Station visited the school to display and explain an astronaut suit.

“It’s a radical concept: learning can be fun,” joked fourth-grade science teacher Rusty Bresser.