Ossining Students Travel the World in their Summer School Studies

The theme of Anne M. Dorner Middle School’s summer program is “Where in the World?” That means the culture and traditions of China, Egypt, Chile and other countries are infused into the math, English and science concepts they are learning.

In Melissa Ferraro’s summer math class, rising sixth-graders who were studying Brazil connected the country’s national sport to their work. They generated their own data by tracking many times each team could get a mini soccer ball into a plastic cup. Then students calculated mean, median and mode based on their findings.

In an English language arts class for rising seventh-graders, students who were studying Chile read a myth about a Chilean woman who married a widower with four children and invited them to live with her. When one child made fun of the woman’s foot, which had only two toes, she got mad and made everything disappear.

Ariana Chuni said the moral of the story is people should keep mean thoughts to themselves and only say nice things. It is a lesson she can apply to her own life.

“When you meet a new person, don’t say something mean because you might hurt them,” she said.

The four-week program, which ends Friday, includes four half days of coursework followed by visits to Rockefeller State Park Preserve on Fridays. Rising sixth- and seventh-graders have studied math and English language arts, and rising eighth-graders have tackled those subjects as well as earth science.

On Mondays, students mapped coordinates of the country they were studying. Every Tuesday was “Take-Out Tuesday,” during which they ordered from a menu of the country they were studying and converted prices into U.S. dollars. The other days were “Work Together Wednesdays” and “Think Data Thursdays.”

Another part of the summer program is the English as a New Language Newcomer Academy. One morning toward the end of July, teacher Adriana Frega stopped to tell her students how proud she was of all they had accomplished.

“I am in awe of how much you have grown as writers,” she said. “You have done such an amazing job at taking the content that we’re giving you and putting it together in a cohesive way. So you all should feel very, very proud because you have worked really, really hard.”

Henri Mondragon, who is going into seventh grade, said he liked reading a Chinese folk tale called “Tikki Tikki Tembo” while his class studied China. The story is about a boy with an extremely long name who drowned in a well because it took so long for his brother to tell everyone the boy’s name.

Henri said he liked the topics that the students studied and enjoyed learning about other countries.

Rising sixth-grader Manasseh Agyepong said he liked his teachers. “Both teachers are really fun and they help us out with math and ELA,” he said.

In Nicole Young’s math class for rising seventh-graders, students practiced their mean, median and mode comprehension by playing an interactive game called Quizizz.

Sara Jimenez, who likes educational games like Quizizz and Kahoot!, said spending a month in the program will give her an edge when she starts seventh grade.

“I think it’s going to help me because we’re learning seventh-grade math and I think that once we get to school, we’re going to be a little bit more advanced,” she said.