Volunteers pass on talents to Humewood students.
Isaiah Fisher, 6, adds to a collage under his mother Jackie's watchful eye during the finale of the five-week long Enrichment Clusters program at Humewood Community School on Wednesday. Parents, staff and students gathered to see the results of the sixth year of the special curriculum. (February 24, 2010)
Photo/JOHN PACKMAN
At Humewood Community School, the secret to engaged education is simple: just keep them clustered.For the sixth year, students at Humewood are benefiting from what staff call "enrichment clusters", allowing the school's 300 grades 1 to 6 students to divide themselves into 32 small groups based on common interests."It's much more open-ended than a classroom setting," said Ellen Kelner, the parent volunteer responsible for bringing the cluster program to Humewood six years ago. "There is no goal they have set to achieve, but if they are interested in what they are doing and they have a say in what goes on, they will be more invested in the learning process."Children break into their clusters for 75 minutes every Friday morning. About 50 adult volunteers from the community take time to work on five-week projects ranging in content from news broadcasting to yoga lessons. Other clusters inspired children through taekwando, clay mask making, cooking and snowshoeing.The idea of working in highly focused groupings is not unique to Humewood, but was something Kelner first saw at Palmerston Avenue Junior Public School. The program seemed to be a perfect fit for Humewood and has been gaining popularity each year."It's a community building exercise, too, because many of the clusters are led by volunteers from the community that want to be a part of the classroom, but don't know what to do or who to do it," said Kelner. "The concept is that everyone in the room is there because they love the same thing."It seems to Kelner that while there is no uniform evaluation of the clusters' work, the success of the program can be gauged by the response from the students. Each cluster touches on curriculum in different ways, for example learning math and reading skills by playing a card game called Bakugan."I've never seen kids so focused on what they were doing and these are kids that can't normally sit still for five minutes...they are getting their curricular needs met in a way that is much more fun for them," said Kelner.The cluster enrichment program concluded on Feb. 25 with a Celebration of Talents, when each group took a few minutes to demonstrate their new skills to teachers, volunteers and parents that had gathered at Humewood. This year's clusters were considered a great success, which Kelner hopes will catch on with other schools in the area.She is willing to talk about clustering with other educators and can be reached by contacting the main office at Humewood.