Math might not be considered the No. 1 way to spend school break. But when you incorporate art, karate, baking and compelling guest speakers, students say it adds up to a pretty good time.

“Some people see math as something you hate, especially the Pythagorean Theorem,” said BJ Hardy, a sixth-grader at North Pole Middle School who spent one week of winter break at math camp. “But it was a good way to spend my break.”
About 30 students from local elementary schools gathered at the J.P. Jones Community Center off South Cushman recently for a pizza party and awards ceremony to conclude the camp.
“They’re very rambunctious. They have a lot of energy both to learn, to eat and to play,” said Michelle Scouten, who coordinates the camp through the Alaska branch of the national nonprofit Communities of Schools. The program is funded through a stimulus grant won by the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District.
The camp targets students in kindergarten through sixth grade who struggle with math. It runs during the summer, winter and spring breaks. The days include three hours of math, plus a couple hours of enrichment activities.
The camp is part of a district-wide dropout-prevention program that also features math tutoring at schools. It targets African American students who are below proficiency in math.
“Math is one of my worst subjects,” said Cole Williams, a fifth-grader at Hunter Elementary. “(Camp) helped me understand fractions.”
But not all the students are African-American, and not all have trouble with math. Ben Brooks, a fifth-grader at Barnette, gets As in math class.
The camp taught him more about fractions and also about math’s broad applicability, he said.
“We learned how math will help you in a career,” he said.
Guest speakers came from Design Alaska and the food bank to share how math relates to the real world.
Lafi Skipps, a sixth-grader at North Pole Middle School, said his parents signed him up for camp. He hopes it will help him lift his math grade from a C to a B, he said.
“Some problems I forgot how to do, like dividing decimals,” he said. “By the end of the week it was coming back to me.”
He enjoyed infusing math into cookie dough by measuring out tablespoons and cups of ingredients.
Many of the kids enjoyed the Zentangle session, an art form based on repetitive patterns and black and white ink.
“You gotta really concentrate. If you mess up you gotta go back and start over,” Brooks said.
Zentangle helps kids relax and focus, said art teacher Peggy Birkenbuel. She plays relaxing flute music as kids draw geometric shapes on small index-size cards made out of paper from a special bush in Nepal.
“If you’re a wiggly kid and you do part of it quietly and you’re concentrating, you’ve accomplished something,” she said.
(Source: newsminer.com)