SLIPPERY ROCK

Happy campers stay busy at SRU

Ambitious kids from the area filled a week of their lazy summer days with art projects, science experiments and movie-making during an enrichment program at a local university.

Slippery Rock University offered its annual Enrichment Day Camp last week for third to seventh-graders. The program’s participants spent their days learning about physics, science, stained glass, computers, building spaceships, wildlife, chemistry, art and making paper airplanes.

Students chose four out of 19 courses to take during their week at the camp. They went to two classes in the morning, lunch, then two classes in the afternoon, said Jeff Speers, a Slippery Rock University senior who served as a camp helper for the third time this year.

Speers and his friend Roy Grusheski, a junior at Slippery Rock who was serving his first year as a helper, said they enjoyed being around the kids at the camp.

Danielle Delligotti, 10, of Grove City, said her favorite activity was making mosaic stepping stones out of glass and concrete. This was the second time the soon-to-be fifth-grader attended the camp.

Danielle explained how she made her two stepping stones, encrusted with pastel-colored glass, from concrete blocks and small pieces of glass. She said she plans to use them as doorstops.

Danielle also shared the tin-punched pictures she made with a small, square sheet of tin and a hammer and a nail. She placed a paper pattern over the tin, which was taped to a slab of wood, and punched a design into the tin with the hammer and nail.

Meanwhile, outside, physics students were hurling eggs encased in homemade containers against a brick wall to see how many times the container could hit the wall without breaking the egg. The egg containers were made up mostly of foam rubber, plastic foam and duct tape. One creative student fashioned an intricate basket out of rubber bands for his egg to rest in inside his container.

Speers said the physics is the most popular of the courses. It is also the only course offered for all four periods to include as many students as possible.

As the physics students furiously threw their eggs, aspiring actors, directors and film makers were producing their own cinematic masterpieces.

Toni Hrychyk, 11, of Sharon, wrote and starred in a short film about a girl who decides to enter a float made entirely out of bubblegum in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Disaster ensues when the float encounters a wayward porcupine on the parade route.

"I like to write and I’ve tried for all three years to get into this class," Toni said. "This is the first time I got in. I’ve always wanted to write a play."

Poodles, teen songstress Britney Spears and "electronic overload" -- spending summer vacation playing video games, watching television and surfing the Internet instead of playing outside -- served as the subjects for the other films.