School Age

A kid who’s using his arms to act out (hitting his little sister, say), obviously needs something else to do with those arms. Scaling the heights at an indoor rock-climbing gym is an excellent way to exhaust those little arms. Every Bay Area gym owned by Touchstone Climbing (and there are Touchstone gyms in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, amongst other cities) has programs for kids.

During the school year there are ten-week climbing camps for ages 6-14, usually on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 4pm to 6pm, wherein instructors teach school-age kids the basics of climbing. And in the summertime there are week-long and multi-week camps; lucky Berkeley kids get to meet their instructors at Cragmont Rock Park for a day of outdoors rock climbing. And at all Touchstone camps, parents can join the kids each Friday to climb alongside them.

Call the gym nearest you for dates and pricing but the ten-week sessions run about $200-250, while camps are about the same amount each week.

Mission Cliffs Touchstone Rock Climbing & Fitness, 2295 Harrison Street, San Francisco, 415-550-0515; Class 5 Fitness Touchstone Rock Climbing & Fitness Gym, 25-B Dodie Street, San Rafael, 415-485-6931; Berkeley IronWorks Touchstone Rock Climbing & Fitness, 800 Potter Street, Berkeley, 510-981-9900; Great Western Power Co., 520 20th Street, Oakland, 510-452-2022. All Touchstone gyms can be found at touchstoneclimbing.com.

A landmark 1990 study by the American Association of University Women showed something scary about American girls: by the time they’re in sixth grade, they associate masculinity with power and opportunity and femininity with reserve and restraint. No sexist pig has to keep these girls down; they’ll do it all by themselves.

But not if they can pilot a sea kayak with confidence, or rappel down the side of a cliff. Or, at least, that’s the thinking behind GirlVentures, a San Francisco non-profit that takes girls in 6th-9th grades on vigorous outdoor adventures designed to let them take risks that pay off. They hike, bike, climb mountains, they learn self-defense moves. They bond in the physical, exhilarating ways that are so often closed off to girls, and in doing so, GirlVentures hopes, they will be able to take a flying leap through any glass ceiling.

GirlVentures offers month-long classes on self-defense and urban hikes during the school year, as well as a once-a-week rock climbing class in the East Bay that’s developed a cult following. The prime summer offerings are two-week backcountry camping trips into the Sierra Nevadas. For more information, visit girlventures.org.

Healthy-food-oriented parents whose kids attend a SFUSD school will want to be at Mission High School on Thursday night, at a special meeting organized by parents who hope to change SFUSD’s food policies. Here’s what the flyer says:

Are you interested in learning more about the food in SFUSD schools, and how to improve it? Do you want to see more fresh fruits and vegetables served with school meals? Perhaps you have heard about the food in Berkeley schools and wonder why San Francisco is different? Are you dreaming about locally-grown foods in our cafeterias?”

Why, yes! Yes, I am! I’ll see you there. This is just an evening of brainstorming; petitioning the SFUSD will come later. The meeting is at Thursday, May 21 at 7pm at Mission High School, 3750 18th Street (at Dolores) in San Francisco. Email lenabrook@yahoo.com or visit groups.yahoo.com/group/sffoodsystems/.

For more inspiration, see our earlier post on Ann Cooper, Director of Nutrition for the exemplary Berkeley Unified School District.

Do you have a budding Broadway baby? San Francisco performance company Musical Theatre Works has been holding classes and mounting shows for 12 years, providing a venue for theater-loving kids to get out there and show them what they’ve got. Younger kids (kindergarten and first grade) start out with theater games and songs; kids in grades 2-6 move into stagecraft and improv, and motivated kids aged 8-18 can audition for a space in the Main Stage Performance Company, which puts on several full-scale musicals yearly.

This fall, the little kids will be working on songs and dances from Mary Poppins, the medium-size kids are taking on Wicked, and the performance company will be putting its spin on the Wizard of Oz. Those classes start in September. There’s also a Theatre Works summer program, three three-week sessions in June, July, and August, for kids aged kindergarten to tenth grade.

All classes and performances are held at the Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way (at Roosevelt) in San Francisco. Call 415-641-5988 or visit musicaltheatreworks.org.

Harvey Milk Center, located almost in the exact center of San Francisco adjacent to Duboce Park, has been closed for a few years while its sagging facilities were renovated. The work’s finally almost done, and now Center staff is moving in to the spiffy new digs and cranking up its offerings again with a set of summer day camps. They’re school-day-length and relatively reasonably priced: about $340-$375 for a two-week session, with after-care available for $60 a day.

Offerings include art classes, dance, capoeira, photography (using Harvey Milk’s darkroom facilities, well-known to local photographers), and an intriguing class on making musical instruments from wood and other raw materials. Given that before the renovation, the Center’s facilities were so-so while its instructors were fab, parents may be excited about this ground-floor opportunity to play in a cool new place.

Summer sessions begin June 15 and run through August 14;  camps are for ages 6-9 and run two weeks, Monday through Friday from 9:45am to 3:45pm (after-care is available from 9am to 5pm). The Harvey Milk Center is located at 50 Scott Street (at Waller Street) in San Francisco; call 415-554-8742 visit sfreconline.org.

Plenty of kids will learn how to paint or play soccer this summer…but how many will learn how to make neon art, or the art of blacksmithing? Oakland institution The Crucible has its spring open house this Saturday, the perfect opportunity to check out some unusual demos (art bikes! fire dancing!), and learn about the Crucible’s summer/vacation camps and youth classes.

Kids aged 8-11 get the safest classes: sculpture, jewelry-making, woodcarving. Students age 12 and up, however, get to play with fire, literally: blacksmithing, an introduction to neon art, welding, robotics. Learn about all of them tomorrow, and see what other artists large and small have wrought in the eclectic art exhibition. There’s food and live glassworking and metal casting, and probably dangerous things that spit fire. Oh goody!

The spring open house begins at 11am and runs until 5pm at The Crucible, 1260 Seventh Street (at Union Street), Oakland; call 510-444-0919 or visit thecrucible.org.

Whether a child has developmental delays or just isn’t socially adept, watching him get rejected on the playground repeatedly is something close to a parent’s worse nightmare. But you can’t teach a child to make friends…can you? Social skills training says yes, you sure can.

These types of classes meet weekly, and enrolled students are taught the finer points of skills like listening conversationally, resolving conflicts peacefully, and gracefully entering and leaving social groups (like, say, a bunch of kids gathered over by the slides). Teachers generally introduce a new concept, for instance, controlling inappropriate laughter, do some role-playing with the kids, and then give the kids time to hang out and just practice with a sympathetic adult at the ready to smooth the waters if necessary.

Usually these types of classes take place at hospitals or schools, where you must be enrolled or have insurance coverage to attend. But family support center TALK Line is now offering a 10-week series, Getting Along Together, free of charge to kids age 7 to 11. Classes meet each Thursday; students may start attending any time, but enrollment is required.

TALK Line is located at 1757 Waller Street (at Stanyan Street), San Francisco, the Getting Along Together series meets Thursdays from 5 to 6:30pm. Call Leslie Davidson at 415-387-3684, ext. 422 for more information.

Plenty of girls dream about their Cinderella moment on prom night, but for kids who can’t afford things like $500 limo rides, afterparties, and fancy dresses, the dream’s out of reach. One San Francisco charity can give girls a head start on the dress, at least.

Since 2002, The Princess Project has been handing out gently-used donated dresses to promgoers in need. Girls can either organize into groups of ten or more for private boutique showings, or come to one of the dress giveaway events in the Silicon Valley, San Francisco, or East Bay. Either way, girls can hand-pick what they want from a stash of hundreds of dresses and accessories in all sizes and colors, without paying a dime.

It’s getting close to prom time now, so all the boutique spots are filling up, but there are still giveaway events to come. The next one is in March 28 at the Embarcadero Center 4, Sacramento Street (at Drumm Street), San Francisco, 9am-4pm. Girls who want dresses/boas/purses/jewelry/etc., need bring only a high-school idea and an adult female companion (Mom, Grandma, a friend). No financial information is needed. For more information, visit princessproject.org.

First-round assignments for incoming San Francisco Unified School District kindergarteners have just gone out, and at least 948 local families are currently writhing in agony, having received none of the seven schools they signed up for in the torturous SFUSD lottery system. Still other families are evaluating what they got with varying degrees of unhappiness, asking themselves questions like Can I really get to 40th and Cabrillo by 7:15 a.m.? and Is it worth putting up with getting our seventh-choice school to avoid the hell that is the second-round lottery?

With all the pain there is to go around, conversation is heating up again at the SF K Files, the definitive blog on the SFUSD assignment process.  Forget the SFUSD’s official bulletins; this is the blog with the real down-and-dirty, including the controversy over sibling assignments artificially swelling the percentage of parents the SFUSD claims got a first-round assignment, and the lightning-fast opening of new elementary school De Avila.

Though the blog mistress, a San Fran mom who started the blog when seeking an assignment for one of her two children, posts frequently on various topics, the real action is on the comments board, with useful insider gossip and advice, as well as snarky commentary from cranky parents.

Spaces are still available in the super-popular San Francisco Zoo day camps, set to run April 6-10 and April 13-17, during Bay Area school vacations, natch. The buzz on the camps is that little campers are led on adventurous walks to meet the different animals; they get a very intimate view and learn about their care and habitat from zookeepers. The springtime camp is particularly sweet, as that’s when the baby animals are born, and kids can marvel over nests and tiny, floppy baby paws. Then there are animal crafts and activities, and vigorous games. Kids seem to go crazy over it all, which is why the camps sell out every season.

For pre-K and kindergarten-aged kids (age 4 and up), the day runs from 9am until noon; kids in first through fourth grades come at 9am and hang around until 4pm. Early drop-offs (8am) are available for both sets of campers; the older group can also be picked up late at 5pm.

If you want to sign your child up, better hurry because once the camps are sold out, that’s it until summertime.

Call 415-753-7073, email zoocamp@sfzoo.org, or visit sfzoo.org.