Centers to learn from

Danette Goulet

NEWPORT BEACH - It was a hodgepodge of activity that could have shook

the rafters, but instead was as muted as a library.

After a quick huddle, students in Heather Manchester’s fifth-grade

class at Newport Elementary School on Monday broke away and took up their

positions at one of 12 “learning centers.”

The goal is to engage all the students while Manchester works with

individual reading groups. The idea is to make sure students of all

levels are challenged.

At one side of the classroom, two boys eagerly donned plastic gloves

and grabbed the halved sheep hearts awaiting their examination.

“Why do we have to wear gloves?” groaned Taylor Stevenson, 11.

“You want to touch it? You’re sick,” replied Jeff Cefalia, 10, as he

stuck a gloved finger into a heart.

Educational, fascinating and a tad rank at the same time, students

thoroughly enjoyed the hands on science center.

A bookcase away, three girls wrote poetry and stories as part of the

writing center.

One wrote a poem that started with the word “school” down the

left-hand side of the page and worked off the letters.

Another was writing an intricate fictional spy story.

“I’m writing about bullies and how they should go to seminars so they

won’t be mean to people,” said Brandijo Kistler, 10.

Down and around a grouping of desks, sat a crew assembling Styrofoam

states at the geography center.

The group was building a huge raised map of the United States on the

floor.

One boy sorted labels with the names of all 50 states on them. Another

sat amid a pile of multicolored states trying to determine which was

which by shape. A third sat on the sponge puzzle board and fit the Velcro

states together while a girl, looking at the picture on the puzzles box,

directed the rest.

Still more students sat scattered on the floor, at desks -- even on

counter tops reading books and doing other center activities quietly.

Two students played checkers as part of their logic center, while a

couple more played Yatzee, a math activity.

Before I reached the bank of computers to find out what they were

doing, there was a tap on my shoulder.

“We found you online,” Dillan O’Neal, 11, said to me. “We looked you

up on the Web.”

Dillan, who was at the research center, where she could research

anything she chose online, decided to find out a bit about the visitor to

the classroom.

“I read this story by you,” said Ashley Flynn, 10. “Did you write the

whole thing?”

When I came full circle and checked back with the progress of the

science boys -- they had taken off the gloves and were diving in with

relish.

“It feels a lot slimier,” Taylor said.