THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 2, 1996 TAG: 9608010142
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY GREG BURT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 56 lines
While many elementary students have spent their summer vacations at camp living in the woods and eating fire-roasted marshmallows, 250 Virginia Beach gifted children went to camp at school.
Teachers at the Old Donation Enrichment Camp at the Old Donation Center for the Gifted and Talented took their classrooms beyond the ordinary last month.
``Anybody been surfing before?'' asked 17-year-old lifeguard Jonathan Durkee, as hands shot up around the room.
The fourth- and fifth-graders huddled their chairs in close as Durkee and his surfing buddy, Jason Oliver, held up a map of the East Coast and asked the kids if they knew where the best surfing spots were.
``The beach,'' one camper offered.
The young men not only explained to the class the important differences between short and long boards, but defined some important surfer lingo like, ``wipe out,'' ``tubed'' and the meaning of ``goofy-footed'' (putting one's left foot to the rear of the surfboard when most use their right).
Durkee's mother, Linda, is a science teacher at the school and a three-year veteran of the summer program. She drew on speaker resources close to home, such as her son, to fit her theme, ``Visions of Summer.''
She also invited her husband, Neale, a North Bay crabber, to speak to the class. The kids got to hold live crabs, learn a crab's life cycle, and then cooked a few and cracked them open for eating.
The gifted camp's second- through fifth-grade students spent $120 for the two-week, six-hour-a-day camp. Program activities were specially geared toward teaching students with hands-on activities, coordinator Martha Tompkins said. To qualify for the camp, a child needed a teacher recommendation and must be an honor roll student or attend classes at the Old Donation Center during the regular year.
Each day, students were under the tutelage of four teachers. Faye Walker's creative expressions class made sunglasses, wrote about personal visions of summer, and designed amusement park rides out of marshmallows and raw spaghetti. Language study also was part of the curriculum. The second- and third-graders studied French, fourth grade tackled German, while Lorraine Bennett, dressed in a white toga, taught her fifth-graders that ``Latin is still alive.''
The point behind these activities, teachers agreed, was to encourage students to ``think beyond the ordinary.'' During the school year, the Old Donation Center holds enrichment classes once a week for intellectually gifted elementary students in Virginia Beach Public Schools. Twelve-year ODC veteran Durkee described a gifted student as one of high intelligence, a good student and someone who ``thinks in a more critical way.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by MORT FRYMAN
Josh Olmstead, left, and Vinny Pellegrino wait in the crowded
hallway to go to their next class Old Donation Enrichment Camp.
Tiffany Ng decorates a T-shirt in Elizabeth Carriott's art class,
where different art projects are under way during the camp. by CNB