A Sorrentino Summer

The Sorrentino campers having fun during Sorrentino CRC Tournament Week

Sorrentino CRC Tournament Week Winners

Our summer camp programming for the CRC has been going very well, the 45 campers we have this year are enjoying learning new skills that we have based on projects from the CRC Afterschool Technology Curriculum, as well as a few of my own projects that I have implemented as well.

The children are getting more and more computer savy each day and it's been so nice and rewarding to see them build skills that they can use in the future. They have been learning the basics of MS Word, Excel, Publisher, PowerPoint, as well as being able to navigate the Internet more independently than they have been before.

In July the children completed several projects, including "Getting to Know the Computer", "Reaching for the Stars", "Mosaic Project", and for the final July project they are custom desigining "Soul T's" which are custom designed T-shirts.

We also held a CRC tournament week the week of July 30th- August 3rd for all three camp groups and each day of the week was a diffrent game- at the end of the week I had determined the winners for first, second, and third places in each group based on an average of their scores. The winners were awarded medals and all the children think this is something that we should hold again next summer. This may turn into an annual event for our summer camp program.

The children are looking forward to the coming weeks in which they will be working on an Internet Scavenger Hunt, "All About Me" PowerPoint presentations, and for the final August project a Kid Pix Quilt.


On the technical side of things, we now have newly re-imaged workstations and things are going smoothly. Cyber Patrol was successfuly installed on all our workstations and I would like to say a huge thank you once again to our CRC/MIS technicians, Jules, Wilner and Ramon for making it a smooth transition for us and also answering all my technical questions along the way.

Since the center construction is almost completed, the center is now reopened for the public to use. We have seen an increase in the interest of patrons wanting to utilize the Sorrentino CRC. I have been keeping a waiting list of (names and phone numbers) for September classes for adults and seniors and will also be starting an email list for those individuals that have email addresses to inform them of when classes will be forming.

We are also looking forward to the Grand Reopening & Ribbon Cutting Ceremony for the center which will be held on Tuesday, August 28, 2007.

NYC Global Parters Final Project

We finally started our final project for the NYC Global Partners Program entitled "Exploring My Environment" this past Friday. The Afterschool children started building what Far Rockaway will look like in the year 2020 and including new inventions that they created. They will also be doing an introduction and also a visual presentation to the project as well.

We were given a $100.00 gift card from Pearl Paint & Art Supply and we had a fun time spending it. We bought a lot of supplies and we are all confident that the end results are going to be awesome. We're also looking forward to NYC Global Partners Day on June 7th- if it was anything like last year we're guaranteed to have some fun :-)

Welcome All!

Finally we have a new blog to share with everyone :-)

We've been really busy as of late in the Sorrentino CRC. Our Afterschool program has been really busy with Immigrant Week in which our 8-9 year olds did tons of Internet research on India and not only prepared an awesome presenation in Powerpoint but also created two presentation boards and also a clay model of the Taj Mahal.

In our NYC Global Partners Junior (formerly Sister Cities) program were treated to our Global Classroom Guide (Fullbright Scholar) this past Friday, April 27, 2007. A visiting Fullbright scholar from Madrid prepared a presentation that consisted of explaining the culture, architecture, food, arts, and environmental issues regarding Madrid. There was also a brief Spanish lesson as well for the children. There were a total of 8 children present for this special guest. He was very entertaining and the children enjoyed themselves and asked intelligent questions about the presentation.

It was a great visit and I really love that the children enjoyed it as well. It was also the perfect prelude to us starting to construct our final project for the NYC Global Partners Program which will start this Friday :-)

On a side note renovations are almost finished for the center- the CRC is about 99.9% done (just minor things that they got to finish up) and I can't wait to be able to show it off to the public. All in all the center has really been transformed - it's amazing to see all the changes firsthand. We're also scheduled to have a official reopening of the center (TBA) with the Commissioner in attendance and a ribbon cutting ceremony.

~Danielle~