As summer is approaching, many parents start to plan family vacations, student summer activities and camps. Yes, the summer break is as long as 11-12 weeks and is a great time for growing young student special interesting areas, identifying their talent spots, improving academic performance, and developing strong academic foundations.  

ACES Academic Enrichment Center has served Austin Asian Community for over 10 years. We are familiar with Asian heritage student strength, expectations of family education goals, and areas to be grown. Therefore, we designed our curriculum which are specifically tailored for students in our community.

This summer, ACES offers summer courses around four core areas, namely, English Enrichment courses for elementary and middle school students, Test Preparation courses for high school students and 7th - 9th graders, Elementary Competition Math courses, and Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Programming courses.

English Enrichment courses for elementary and middle school students

The English Enrichment courses include English reading, writing, vocabulary and public speaking/debate which are core elements of English ability skills. The curriculum is designed for 4^th – 8^th graders. Based on student English skills, we developed three levels of the courses. The level I is for 4^th-5^th graders, the level II is for 5^th -6^th graders and the level III is for 6^th-8^th graders. Each subject of the courses is a weeklong course with three and half hours per day. Each subject is an independent study unit without prerequisite to other units except public speaking/debate. Every week, we offer two subjects for each level, one subject during the morning time and one subject in the afternoon. Students can select AM session, PM session or both sessions. If a student selects both AM and PM sessions, microwave oven is available for students to warm their lunch. Students can have their lunch in the student lunch room. ACES will have staff to assist students and monitor students’ activities in the  lunch room..

English and Public Speaking/Debate Camp for 4^th -5^th graders. The course schedule is listed below.

English and Public Speaking/Debate Camp for 5^th -6^th graders. The course schedule is listed below.

English and Public Speaking/Debate Camp for 6^th -8^th graders. The course schedule is listed below.

Competition Math for elementary and middle school students

 

This summer, ACES will offer competition math for elementary and middle school students. The courses are designed for elementary and middle school students with 4 levels which are 2^nd-3^rd, 3^rd-4^th, 4^th-5^th and 5^th-7^th. Each level of competition math has two units. Each unit is a weeklong half day camp. For a given level, the two units will cover different contents so that a student can register for one unit or both units for his/her level.

 

For 2^nd -5^th grade students, we give the course name as “competition math” because we cannot find a better course title. The real objective of the math courses is to inspire students’ love and passion for math and let them realize math’s beauty and understand that the process of learning math is fun and interesting.

 

The competition math courses will give interesting math puzzles to students for increasing students’ interesting and improving students’ motivation. For each level’s completion math problems, instructors will categorize problems into different problem types and work on each type of problems step by step.

SAT/PSAT Test Preparation courses

The summer break is a great opportunity for high school sophomore and junior to reserve a block of time for improving SAT exam performance and getting ready for college applications. ACES offers two sessions of 4 week long session of summer SAT intensive workshops. The ACES SAT intensive workshop has been proved that students had achieved great SAT performance improvement. The SAT foundation course is 2-week long course which meets 4 times per week and 3 hours per meet. The SAT foundation courses are SAT Introduction courses for 7^th-9^th graders for students to get familiar with SAT exam, test content and problem types, and learn test strategies and time management.

ACES Physics, Chemistry and Biology courses

ACES has offered ACES Physics courses for 6 years. The original objective of the ACES physics courses is for middle school students and high freshmen/sophomore students to study physics earlier than their peers and to be prepared to participate in US Physics Olympiad F=ma contest. Since the start of ACES physics program, we have total 18 students awarded as USA Olympiad semi-finalists which are great academic achievement. The ACES physics covers algebra based Newton mechanics. From students’ feedbacks, the ACES Physics courses are also very helpful in improving student’s high school Physics I performance. Many students took ACES Physics courses for better managing high school GPA.

This summer, we start to offer Pre-AP Chemistry and Pre-AP Biology courses per suggestions from students and parents. Each subject will consist of two units. Each unit is a two weeklong course with 3 and half hours Monday to Friday. The two units of ACES Chemistry will cover the content of high school Pre-AP Chemistry. Similarly, the two units of ACES Biology will teach the materials of high school Pre-AP Biology course. The ACES Chemistry and ACES Biology courses are designed as introduction and pre-review courses of high school Pre-AP courses of the same subjects. They will be helpful for students to climb the steep initial learning curve and to better manage high school GPA.