1. Art –Drawing: 8 Weeks - “Seeing” is the first step to learning to draw. Discover how to sharpen the way you look at things, increase the expressiveness of your drawings, and improve your drawing skills. Individualized guidance will help you achieve the results you want as well as lead you through the use of basic design principles.
2. Art –Paper Mache: 8 Weeks - Create animals, people, or whatever your imagination desires. Bring newspaper and a smile.
3. Chess: 8 Weeks - Learn to play. Improve your skills. Instructional class designed for different playing levels - the just beginning to the veteran player. Learn to play for fun, for the challenge of the game, or to become a competitive match player.
4. Digital Imagery & Animation – 8 Weeks - Take any photo and turn it into artwork. Using Adobe Photoshop Elements students will learn to twist, turn, and liquefy photos. Students will explore how to create animations with basic drawings using Photoshop. Then they turn their animation into a video with transitions, sounds, and titles.
5. Extended Care Supervised Study Daily- space and opportunity provided for students to study, read, or work on homework. Tutoring help made available through high school volunteers. Computers available.
6. Mind Lab South Florida – 8 Weeks: Mind Lab is an innovative and research proven program that helps children ages 4-14 to enhance their cognitive, social and emotional skills using well-selected thinking games. With the games we teach the fundamentals of problem solving, decision making, deduction and induction procedures, teamwork, communication and the art of graceful winning and losing. During the curriculum the concepts are applied to real life situations, allowing children to make transference from game scenarios to real life experiences and scholastic achievements.
The extensive research conducted by Yale University endorses that the Mind Lab Method significantly improves math and verbal scores as well as other important thinking and life skills.
The Mind Lab program was selected for the 2007 Florida K-12 Conference and Innovation Fair.
Mind Lab Course Description:
1) Forward Planning
This course contains 8 one-hour lessons. The games included are Rush Hour, Pylos, Cartagena, and Octi. In this course the children will learn the basics of planning. They will first be shown the immense advantages of forward planning over trial and error. This will be followed by exposing the children to other planning strategies such as the Detective Method, the Efficient Allocation of Resources, Relating to One’s Peers and the Stoplight Method. To conclude they will learn the differences between short and long-term planning and will see that sometimes success in the long-term requires short-term sacrifices.Learning the Stoplight Method and understanding the opponent’s intentions help to sharpen the children’s interpersonal intelligence and empathy. The children will realize that in every action involving another human being we should try to get into his/her shoes and view the action from a different perspective.
2) The Benefits of Collaboration
This course contains 6 one-hour lessons. The games included are Four-in-a-Row, Abalone, Lunar Lockout and Blokus. This course will highlight the positive effects that a harmonious and united group can generate when the members cooperate and work together. The concepts of working together and collaboration will first be examined both in terms of offensive and defensive activities. We will witness how the collaborative group almost always enjoys an advantage over the lone individual and assess the pros and cons of mutual help and interdependence between group members. It will be shown that sometimes the special talents and abilities of a particular group member are the key to the group’s success. The children will be required to put all these points into practice in game-playing sessions involving both verbal and non-verbal interaction. It goes without saying that as well as the cognitive elements this course places special emphasis on the socio-emotional and ethical fields.
7. Performance Skills: 6 Weeks- program is designed to help students succeed in middle school. Students identify how they learn best and then how to make proper adjustments to the different teaching styles of their individual instructors. In addition students are taught skills in goal-setting, managing time, organizing, listening and note taking, long range planning, studying and test-taking. Students are also given instruction in process writing, including brainstorming, outlining, writing, and revising.
8. Sports – Supervised Playground Basketball and Flag Football: Daily- equipment and space provided for students to be active and participate in daily organized games or just shoot it, throw it, kick it, catch it.
9. Video: Game Design I – 8 Weeks - Students will have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of future digital technology and artificial intelligence. Students will learn how to create their own video game. Students will utilize Multimedia Fusion 2, the most flexible, powerful, full-featured tool available. Graphic based drag and click procedures allow everyone to master this incredible achievement.
10. Video: Game Design II – 8 Weeks - NWN2 Module Design Class:
We are honored to provide something new and exciting. You will be creating your own virtual playable community where you and your characters can interact with your classmates.
You will be utilizing Neverwinter Nights 2 Software Development Kit to create a historic world with knights, princesses, spells and mystical creatures that you and your classmates will build and explore. Once complete you will be able to interact with the creations of the entire class to make a new virtual history.
Provided will be the tools, software and instruction necessary to expand your abilities and mind beyond anything you thought possible. All you need is your imagination and desire to play. Upon completion, students will have created their own playable world that is theirs to keep.