Ossining Students Created, Learned and Had Fun on Enrichment Day

From making raisins dance and concocting slime to building card houses and cooking wontons, Claremont School students had a great time on Enrichment Day Nov. 22.

The third- and fourth-graders attended two morning workshops before heading home for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Making slime – a semi-solid polymer – was by far the most popular activity, with eight sections per period. “This is the best day of my life,” fourth-grader Richard Chillogallo said as he mixed glue, shaving cream, laundry detergent and blue die. “I wish we could do this every day.”

Fourth-grader Michelle Tsentides agreed. “This is my all-time favorite project,” she said.

As they stirred the soupy ingredients to make blue, green and pink slime, children had different ideas about what the concoction looked like in process. They came up with a ghost, vanilla ice cream and a hurricane.

The Claremont School PTA purchased supplies for many of the workshops and members volunteered in classrooms on Enrichment Day.

“The administrators, teachers and PTA all worked together to help children try something new or participate in an activity they are passionate about,” Principal Kate Mathews said. “We want children to love school, and Enrichment Day is a wonderful chance to expand a child’s experience.”

There was a wide range of topics for children to delve into, from learning about animals of the Galapagos Islands and making models out of clay to a workshop called “Yoga and the Animal in You.” Students made origami, hanging pinecone bird feeders, Japanese moss ball hanging string gardens and Thanksgiving bracelets, among other projects.

In the STEM/LEGO class, children had four 10-minute challenges – build a tower, build a bridge, build something that can fly and free build.

In one of third-grader Melissa Abzun’s enrichment classes, she learned how to make a fall-themed wreath. She and other children glued artificial leaves and ribbon to orange paper plates with the middle cut out. “We usually only put stuff up for Christmas, so I wanted to do something for Thanksgiving,” she said.

Maribel Hernandez, who is in fourth grade, built a two-level structure out of cards in one of the workshops she attended. It took her five or six tries to get it up without having the “walls” collapse. “I never built with cards before and it looked like fun and it sounded like fun,” she said.

In the Chinese cooking class, children learned how to make wontons. They read a story together called “Tikki Tikki Tembo,” which is based on an ancient Chinese folktale, while the food was cooking. As he ate a wonton, third-grader Jonathan Suarez said it was pretty good.

“The crispiness is nice. The meat is good. But it needs a little bit more stuff,” he said, referring to spices.