It isn’t all fun and games

Danette Goulet

CORONA DEL MAR -- A day of fun and games for seventh-graders at Corona

Del Mar High School was, in fact, teaching them valuable lessons.

It was part of a program called Project Adventure, which the school is

introducing at the seventh-grade level. Depending on its success,

officials at the school hope to add it to the eighth-grade curriculum

next year, said Kim Patrick, an English teacher at Corona Del Mar.

“It’s an activity day that works on teaching self-esteem through a

game-oriented day,” Patrick said. “It works on team building,

cooperation, playing fair and playing safe.”

Students all had a favorite game, whether it was the calculator game, the

jump rope game, the name game or one of at least 10 others. But each game

had one thing in common -- they taught teamwork.

Each team enthusiastically tried to beat the other teams. In order to do

that, they had to work together to solve problems.

In the “islands” game, 12-year-old Grant Almquist explained, students

were required to fit into consecutively fewer and fewer circles until

there was only one left for them all to squeeze into.

“We all sat on our bottoms around the circle so that we could all fit,”

he said proudly.

Patrick and several of the other seventh-grade teachers have started

using some of the Project Adventure activities in their classrooms,

Patrick said.

Project Adventure is a nonprofit organization which was started in

Massachusetts by the principal of a school that was beginning to have a

drug problem, said Scott Garman, the West Coast project manager for

Project Adventure.

The principal wanted to give children the tools they would need to handle

the influx of negative influences, Garman said. He developed the

organization based on his background with the Outward Bound adventure

program, in which people hike into the wilderness as a test of their

stamina and courage.

The program was funded by the PTA and the school’s foundation in an

effort to give the seventh-graders a sense of self-worth, said Michelle

Mutzke, president of the middle school PTA.

Besides the teamwork games, the students also worked on building trust

within their groups. These activities included the traditional act of

falling backward and trusting their teammates to catch them -- an

exercise teachers and parents all remembered from their youth.

“It’s hands-on character education,” Patrick said. “We’d like to get it

here on a more permanent basis.”