The Rockport Recreation Department's summer fun program is back this year.
The summer fun program is an interactive day camp experience for children going into grades one to five.
The camp runs Mondays through Thursdays from July 9 through Aug. 9, from 9 a.m. to noon.
The price is $135 for the five weeks, and the program takes place at Rockport Elementary School.
Sports, games, arts and crafts, and other activities are available.
Parents can register their children through a form on the department's website at www.rockportreceration.com under youth programs/summer fun.
Anyone with questions may call 978-546-1309.
The Legend Dances
Just before school let out for the summer, Rockport Elementary School third-graders presented Cape Ann Legend Dances and Sea-Lebration Songs to parents and community residents.
The children demonstrated choreography they created during a week-long artist-in-residence program directed by Carl Thomsen, and funded by the Educational Foundation for Rockport.
Thomsen's Legends Dance program focused on themes associated with local history, inspiring movements based on whales, schooners, fishing, wind or waves, fish, and other themes of interest to the children.
Thomsen attempted to show the children that you can "talk with your body, not just your mouth," encouraging them to create single movements, then combine them in sequences that tell a story in what he calls "danslations."
For example, several children combined movements for a sail, a bow, a rudder, and hull and together moved across the floor in the image of a schooner skimming the waves. The program is aligned with the third grade teachers' curriculum on local history, and helps the students absorb material in new ways.
For the 2011-12 school year, the local educational foundation funded 11 programs for a total of $53,975 in its continuing effort to bring enrichment experiences for all Rockport schoolchildren.
Lessons of the past
The History Book Club at Rockport Public Library will discuss events of the last 50 years when it meets Wednesday at 7 p.m.
The group is open to everyone who likes to read history and apply its lessons to current events. Unlike groups where everyone reads the same title, history club participants select any nonfiction that fits the topic.
Possible subjects for this month's discussion include presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush, the Cuban missile crisis, the Great Society, civil rights, the Vietnam war, Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair, the collapse of Communism, the space program and the first Gulf War. New members and nonreaders are welcome. Former history professor William Tobin leads the discussion.
'The Swerve'
Rockport Public Library's Current Issues political book discussion group will meet Wednesday, June 27, at 3 p.m. to discuss Stephen Greenblatt's award-winning "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern."
Copies of the book will be available at the library and Toad Hall bookstore. New members and visitors are welcome to attend.
"The Swerve" earned the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the 2011 National Book Award for nonfiction. The book is part adventure story and part a history of ideas. Greenblatt holds that the discovery of a manuscript missing for a millennium changed the course of human thought and made possible the world today.
The manuscript, found nearly 600 years ago, was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, "On the Nature of Things," by Lucretius.
Quick hit
Rockport Public Library has just joined the social media world.
"Look for us and 'like' us on Twitter and Facebook," say library officials.
Rockport Ramblings is compiled each week by reporter Marjorie Nesin. If you have a news tip or an item for Ramblings, contact Nesin at 978-283-7000 x3451, or mnesin@gloucestertimes.com. Staff Writer Gail McCarthy contributed to this column.
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