Bruins doin’s: ICE Girls award Somersworth Middle School students for finished projects

By Amanda Beland
Foster’s Daily Democrat
January 19, 2012

SOMERSWORTH — Two members of the Boston Bruins Ice Girls with their furry friend and mascot, Blades, paid a visit to Somersworth Middle School Wednesday morning to see some of the final projects completed by the students during their temporary enrollment in I.C.E. School.

I.C.E. School is a collection of lesson plans developed by Bruins staff to help students learn required subjects with a twist of hockey. The lesson plans, available online, are created to meet state education standards for grades pre-kindergarten to eighth grade in the subjects of French, geography, math, English, language, arts and science.

For the past several weeks, middle school students completed I.C.E. lessons plans in math and reading comprehension, among other subjects.

On Wednesday morning, some of the students got to present their hard work to Rory Patten and Kelly Thomson, two of the current Bruins Ice Girls, as well as Blades at a schoolwide assembly.

First, a group of sixth-graders presented Bruin’s ice rinks constructed out of paper. Participating students first took the actual size of the Bruin’s ice rank in feet and converted it to inches. Then, the students constructed miniature paper ice rinks, complete with the Bruins colored logo in the middle.

Along with the ice rinks, another group of sixth-graders presented handwritten Hock-us to their classmates. Hock-us, similar to Haikus, are several line poems where a certain number of syllables is required of each line.

Although the structure of the poems were set, the subjects of the creations were up to the students — as long as they related to hockey, of course. Some of the chosen subjects included overtime and the excitement of the game itself.

But, these weren’t the only activities completed by the students. According to Kathy Patten, mother of Ice Girl Rory and reading comprehension teacher at SMS, participating students did everything from completing research on every Bruins player to finding out a little more about the visiting Ice Girls. Students even wrote down their reading goal for the year on a paper shaped hockey puck before placing it on one of the school’s walls in the shape of the Boston Bruin’s logo.

“It was very successful and the kids loved it,” said Patten.

Patten began looking into bringing the Ice Girls to SMS after her daughter became a member of the group four years ago. Initially, Patten just wanted to bring members of the Ice Girls to the school to promote reading and initiate literacy activities between the visitors and students.

However, after she began researching the Bruins community page, she found out about I.C.E. school lessons and thought it was the perfect scenario for SMS to become involved in. Hosting the Ice Girls was just another added plus to the assembly.

“I call them the ambassadors to the Bruins,” said Patten. ‘They’re not cheerleaders, which is generally what comes to mind. They’re great role models and accomplished young women.”

At the end of the assembly, every SMS student received a special reward for the completion of their projects: an authentic, real-life Bruins hockey puck.

“COOL,” the crowd of SMS students bellowed after the announcement.