Fourth-grader Aylin Gamarra displays her suminagashi, which is an art form that creates patterns by floating ink on water and transferring them onto paper or fabric.
School on Saturday?
That is how it is at Carteret Elementary School. It’s called Saturday Academy and it’s fun.
Its activity coordinator is reading interventionist Amy Konzelmann-Garcia who said the academy was started by Principal John Baltz and is in its twelfth year. She has been the coordinator for 10 of those years.
“It’s a four-week academy, 9 to 11:50 and every class is 50 minutes,” she said.
It’s a tight schedule and punctuality is essential.
“We all start in the gym and then the kids go to their classrooms,” she said. “They’ve signed up for three classes. After each class, we all come back to the gym and transition into the second class. After that class, again we go back to the gym, transition and then it’s time for dismissal. Mom picks their kids up.”
Ten classes are offered and it is the teachers who decide what topic they will teach. They are given an hour of planning each week.
“They’re excited, too,” Konzelmann-Garcia said of the teachers. “And it’s a much more casual environment. That’s what makes it fun.”
Soccer, she said, is the only class to have been taught all 12 years, but there is an effort to have a science class each year.
“There’s Leggo and dance, a music class for creative kids, the Snack Lab where the kids help to make grilled cheese sandwiches, have a salad and orange wedge and learn about nutrition, and a Japanese Art Lab. That’s new this year,” she said. “Soccer, Mr. Baltz and I have been here the longest, and the soccer coach, Michael Cullen. He grew up in Bloomfield and so did Mr. Baltz.”
The academy, she said, is “a little more out of the box than regular school, more hands-on, certainly more casual and a lot less pressure.
“The kids are excited to come,” she said. “We have 140 enrolled in the academy and the total school enrollment is 345. And it’s free.”
A dozen years ago, the academy started out having two four-week sessions. Then it became one six-week session, then one five-week session and now survives as a four-week session.
“That’s because of budget restrictions,” Konzelmann-Garcia said. “But we’re lucky we can even do it. That’s how we feel about it.”
In the Japanese Art Lab, the kids were learning by doing the ancient Japanese technique of suminagashi. This is a picture-making technique using colored inks combined with a soapy detergent, floating on a bath of water. Paper is dipped into the bath to produce the picture. One girl taking the class, fourth-grader Aylin Gamarra, explained.
“The picture is like a marble rainbow,” she said.
Konzelmann-Garcia said the academy was definitely a program the parents asked about at the beginning of the school year.
“It’s an opportunity to get the kids off their cell phones and out of the house,” she said.
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