Kids Visit College For Taste of Future and Touch of Slime

It was anything but a typical school day for kindergartners from El Camino Real Elementary.

After all, it’s not every day Irvine youngsters get a chance to see a laser demonstration, examine the fossil of a saber-toothed tiger skull, watch green slime being made, and jump on the ground and see a seismograph reading of their “earthquake.”

But then it’s not every day they’re on a college campus.

On Friday, the 32 students from El Camino Real Elementary were bused to Irvine Valley College, where they joined about 700 other kindergarten students for the eighth annual KinderCaminata, an event designed to encourage young students to aspire to higher education.

The college visits are held on or near the March 31 birth date of Cesar Chavez, the late United Farm Workers founder, whose motto, “Si, se puede” (“Yes, we can”) sums up the spirit of the day.

“This is really in celebration of the lessons Cesar Chavez wanted young people to know: You can be anything you want to be, and education is the key,” said Terry Mayle, a kindergarten teacher at Westwood Basics Plus Elementary in Irvine.

This year, some 6,000 Orange County kindergartners will visit Orange County college campuses during the event, which will continue Friday at Golden West College and April 6 at Fullerton College and Santiago Canyon College. Cypress and Santa Ana colleges joined Irvine Valley in participating Friday.

Sporting KinderCaminata baseball caps with Class of 2017--the year they would graduate from college--and Chavez’s motto emblazoned on the front, groups of children strolled through the campus watching academic demonstrations and learning about various careers.

Firefighters and local law enforcement agencies were well-represented with a fire engine, a police cruiser, a CHP helicopter and a high-tech Police Community Response Center van, prominently displayed in the center quad.

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But even the CHP canine couldn’t compare to the popularity of green, gooey slime, part of a chemistry demonstration. The result of mixing Borax, glue, water and food coloring in a beaker, it elicited a chorus of predictable responses:

“Yucky!”

“Do we get to play with it?”

Everyone had a favorite demonstration. “I liked the bone,” said Alec Krolik, 5, from El Camino Real Elementary, referring to the saber-toothed tiger fossil.

This is the fifth year Alec’s teacher, Starr King, has participated in KinderCaminata, which takes its name from the German word for “children” and the Spanish word for “walk”’ or “excursion.”

“What we stress to them is even students in kindergarten need to think about what you want to be when you grow up, and in order to achieve that, you have to go to college and get an education,” she said.

It’s also important to expose children to careers they might not even know exist, King said--for example, jobs in the field of geology.