Students Get Set for Odyssey

What do a boy wearing a spotted puma suit, a girl sporting a floppy hat and feather boa and the Statue of Liberty have in common?

On Thursday afternoon, all three were practicing for an Odyssey of the Mind presentation that they’ll be making this weekend.

The young actors and their three teammates, all first- and second-grade students at Palmer Elementary School, will perform their eight-minute “Money Maker” skit at Odyssey’s Southeastern Pennsylvania regional competition, to be held from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday at Southern Lehigh High School in Center Valley.

The team will be joined by three other teams from Palmer, a dozen more teams from the Easton Area School District and more than 100 teams from schools throughout the Lehigh Valley and the five-county Philadelphia area.

Odyssey, an international educational program that began more than 25 years ago, provides creative problem-solving opportunities for students from kindergarten through college.

Other Easton area school sending teams to this year’s regional competition include Cheston, Forks, Shawnee and Tracy elementary schools, Easton Area Middle School 5-6 and Easton Area Middle School 7-8.

At Palmer, as the “Money Maker” team practiced, a team of third and fourth graders was working on a different skit in the school’s Auld Auditorium. 

The seven-member “Team Thing-A-Ma-Jig,” featuring characters named Bullet Bill, Bowser, Toad, Mario, Daisy and Angry Birds, was tackling the competition’s “As Good as Gold…berg” problem, requiring team members to come up with a Rube Goldberg-type device with lots of complicated parts and include an inventor and a marketing pitch for the device in their script.

A few miles away, Mary Lou Hessling, a fifth-grade teacher in the Allentown School District, was helping her sixth-grade daughter Maggie’s team practice a “Le Tour Guide” skit in the family’s living room. Hessling, who is also coaching a team of third graders from Palmer Elementary, including her younger daughter, Emily, points out that participating in Odyssey helps kids learn far more than just how to solve one specific problem—and parents and teachers learn to take a step back and let the kids take charge of everything, including scripts, scenery, costumes and props.

“I think it’s a great opportunity for kids to learn to work with each other,” she says.

Linda Hamel, co-coach of Palmer’s “Team Thing-A-Ma-Jig,” which includes six Palmer students and one student from Holy Family School in Nazareth, says she’s watched her team members change and grow during the several months they’ve been working on their skit.

“Through hard work and dedication, they have created something unique that is their own,” she says.  “You can see the excitement and feel the sense of accomplishment oozing off of these kids every step of the way.”