AMD Students Engage in Fun Project-Based Summer Learning

Anne M. Dorner Middle School’s Summer Explore & Learn Program may have taken place virtually, but it was all about adventure. Rising sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders participated in six mini project-based learning explorations on such disparate topics as Time Travel, Flight School, Love Food/Hate Waste, Football by the Numbers, Adopt a Pet, and Climate Change: Designing a Sustainable Green Island.

The program ran four days a week from July 8-Aug. 4, with a new project each Monday. Each one was an authentic learning experience that involved literacy, math, real-world problem-solving and other essential skills.

Rising sixth-grader Amanda Bottone loved Calling All Chefs with Lesley Pimentel, an AMD reading specialist. Students designed their own restaurant, planned the menu, wrote a review and created an ad campaign.

“It made me happy to have my own restaurant,” Amanda wrote. “I like how we created our own menu too. I like how I got to see everyone’s restaurant’s name and what they will serve.”

AMD is proud of its 2020 Summer Explore & Learn program, Assistant Principal Elizabeth Mercado said. Teachers created a safe, supportive and equitable environment that promoted social, emotional and academic learning.

“We created a fun, rigorous, innovative and engaging learning experience for all our learners,” she said. “Our students had the opportunity to practice 21st century skills, solve meaningful real-world authentic problems, collaborate, develop their time-management skills to be successful in virtual learning, choose the project-based learning topic they were interested in and have a voice in their learning.”

AMD partnered with Teatown Lake Reservation, the Ossining Public Library and student tutors and mentors from Pace, Manhattanville and Fordham universities.

Mimi Sillings of Ossining, a Pace University master’s degree student in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, supported a teacher with several math-based project-based learning adventures and assisted other volunteer mentors and tutors. For Shark Tank, she guided students as they created their products and pitches. She appreciated how invested students were in the My Voice Matters project, which was inspired by Black Lives Matter. They created an essay, poem, painting, song or other means of expressing their feelings.

Ms. Sillings said volunteering for Summer Explore & Learn pushed her to develop as an educator. “For me it was interesting to see how project-based learning was applied across the different academic disciplines,” she said, adding that the typically hands-on classroom activity translated well into the virtual space.

For the Project on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, students created presentations to bring awareness to the little-known collection of debris that spans waters from the West Coast of North America to Japan. A Riverkeeper guest speaker discussed how students could help the environment, and shared statistics on garbage that volunteers collected from the Hudson River in 2019.

Sarah Solganick, a rising sixth-grader, said she enjoyed learning about the patch and the negative impacts of plastic.

“When plastic gets into waterways like the Pacific Ocean, it can be accidentally consumed by aquatic animals, which we may end up eating, and it is an important topic for our community,” she said.

Daisy Rivera, an incoming seventh-grader, said she loves doing research and was proud of her Great Pacific Garbage Patch project.

Her grandmother, Myrna Rivera, said the program was engaging and fun. “I am sure it will prepare her for a successful year ahead,” she said.

Some of the other favorite projects were the Cost of Social Distancing in Live Entertainment and Social Media for School. In Earth II, students learned about the race to find a “second Earth.” They researched possibilities, used math to figure out how long it would take to get there, and hypothesized about how to make the mission a reality.

Karina Umar, a rising seventh-grader, said she liked Social Media for School because she got to be a teacher in a way and make lesson plans for a hypothetical Introduction to Social Media class. “So it was really important to me because I want to be a teacher when I grow up,” she said.

Michelle Castillo, an incoming sixth-grader, said she liked the Adopt a Pet adventure. Students had to select an animal to adopt as a pet, research what it eats and how it lives, and write an adoption proposal for their parents.

Tyler Avenius, a rising sixth-grader, said his favorite class was Shark Tank, in which students created their own product or business pitch. “It really engaged me to do more creative things and I loved thinking outside of the box and having different ideas,” said Tyler, who pitched creating a Sno-Cone Emporium. “It was just really fun to do something new.”

Incoming seventh-grader Tania Bannister also liked that project, as well as the Our Voices Matter class.

“It really inspired me to talk more about our races,” Tania said of Our Voices Matter.

Her mother, Cynthia Smith, said teachers were a great help and had an open forum for students to express their feelings. “It’s not easy,” she said of the project. “It was a challenging, exciting learning experience for them.”