It takes more than two hands to count the number of clubs offered at West Sedona School this spring. The elementary students are staying busy after the school bell rings at 2:30 p.m. with complimentary snacks and opportunities of all kinds.
Mountain biking, volleyball, yoga and Ballet Folklorico dance keep the recess-loving kids active, while piano and band benefit the musically-inclined. Art and Gardening clubs are a great choice for those crafty kids who want to relax a little after a busy eight hours of classes, and unique clubs like robotics, green team and Girl Scouts give kids something totally different from their usual academic work.
WSS Principal Aaron Coleman said that the clubs offered at West Sedona are “a larger amount of clubs than I’ve witnessed” at the other schools he’s worked at in Arizona and beyond.
“I attribute it to the community,” Coleman said of the comprehensive list. “I think we have an eccentric, diverse community, and I think the numbers represent that.”
Coleman also said the after school atmosphere is “great for culture-building” within the school district and “another opportunity to build relationships with students outside of the classroom.”
Teachers are also able to earn extra money on top of their contract if they lead a club, he said. It also benefits parents who generally work later than 3 p.m., when students tend to get dropped off at home by the school buses. Those kids who participate in a free club, courtesy of tax credit donations, also get a healthy snack, thanks to donations from St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix, and are able to have fun [and learn] until 4 p.m., when the second round of school buses come to pick them up.
Just because the clubs aren’t standard math, science or geography classes, that doesn’t mean that the kids aren’t still learning. Coleman said he thinks there is some credence to the idea of kids learning more about things they are interested in and subjects or activities they get to choose.
“I wouldn’t just pick one, I would choose four,” Coleman said when he was asked to choose a club he would be interested in. “Mountain biking, robotics, Ballet Folklorico and yoga would be my four corners.”
The West Sedona Robotics Club is part of the standard Lego League, which has over 350 teams in Arizona of 9- to 14-year-olds. At West Sedona, the fourth-grade boys make up the highest demographic.
On Jan. 19, the club participated in the state competition at Arizona State University. West Sedona’s team placed 21st out of 48. After spring break on Saturday, March 14, the team will head to Flagstaff to participate in a “robot rumble” at Northern Arizona University.
According to club instructor Barbra Robles, who teaches math and science at West Sedona, at robotics competitions students have two-and-a-half minutes to put the robots they designed through a course and complete as many objectives within the course as possible.
The robot the club built for the January competition could drop and lift pieces, go up ramps, move blocks and more.
“The trick is how do they build the arms to lift and lift [objects] a certain way, push things, drop it and catch it [and then] bring things back,” Robles said at a January club meeting. “How you design your robot to do the objectives is where that engineering comes in. And then the programming comes in. There’s a lot of cool things you have to do.”
Robles said in addition to how many points the students get at the competitions, they are also judged on how well they work together.
On that afternoon, kids were working on their own individual Lego projects, asking each other for help or to pass certain colored Legos.
Fourth-grader Ares Lopez said he might be interested in programming when he’s older.
“Cars and planes. I kind of like to build that [kind of stuff],” he said.
Hoyt Henderson, also in fourth grade, said that while he’s “really good” at programming, he doesn’t enjoy that aspect of robotics.
“I wish you could just tell the robot what to do,” he said. “’Go move that thing down that crane’ … that’d be so much easier.”
Hoyt said he enjoys getting to build with Legos the most, which he had been doing for six years before joining the club.
“I want to build robots, and people can program them for me,” Henderson said for his future aspirations.
At Green Team club, 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders learn about how to keep their environment clean by reading books, having teacher-led discussions and participating in interactive activities.
After West Sedona reading specialist and club leader Elizabeth Tavasci finished reading the giant picture book, “Natural Resources,” to the kids and screened their dozens of comments and questions, she led them outside with trash bags to help clean up their playground.
“I always envisioned that this would be the part of the club where they’d be like ‘ugh,’ but they love it,” Tavasci said. “They love taking care of their school. They love knowing that they helped. But then they also are kids and they love running around. It’s like a treasure hunt.”
And sometimes, the students really do find treasure. Tavasci said that besides collecting “an incredible amount of trash” during the monthly clean-ups, one time a student found a $10 bill and she let him keep it.
Tavasci, whose grandfather was a waste management engineer, ran a Save the Earth Club in a school she worked at in Phoenix for seven years before her three-year run as the Green Team head at West Sedona.
“When I came here, Sedona-Oak Creek School District was looking for a Green Team, wanting to teach about sustainability and conservation and all of those things,” Tavasci said. “I’ve always wanted to do primary [school] to kind of get them excited about conservation and sustainability [at the younger ages].”
Some other activities that Tavasci has done in the past with the Green Team is making eco-friendly tips to share with the school at the Friday assemblies, learning and singing songs with the school on recycling, and making signs to put on the sinks reminding students to turn off the water when they are done washing their hands.
First-grader Sophia Pallarez, who had a trash bag halfway full of straws, old paper towels and weeds, said cleaning up was her favorite part of Green Team, “because I like to help the earth.”
West Sedona School students can still join school clubs that haven’t been filled yet. Parents should call 204-6600. Learn more about tax credit contributions that help pay for the after school clubs at sedonak12. org/SedonaKidsTaxCredit. aspx.
