Published: October 11, 2008 10:51 pm         

Classes to be offered to adults in community

If you’re overjoyed at the idea of learning how to sew a handmade baby blanket, you should contemplate enrolling for the Simply Baby class where an instructor will teach you, step-by-step, how to make a blanket for the new baby in your life.

Maybe engine repair, designing your own video game or international cuisine is more your style.

Regardless of your interests, the Raleigh County Academy of Careers and Technology is offering innovative adult community education classes all over Raleigh County.

In cooking with the lunch ladies, two special culinarians from area schools will be instructing a class for those who would like to recapture the memorable smells of a school lunch coming from their own kitchen.

In this course, participants will cook breads and pastries and holiday specialty pies and cakes. They will also learn about healthy cooking, and the importance of implementing spices into food for flavor and staying away from high-sodium salt. Everything in this class will be made from scratch.

For more than 13 years, instructor of Cooking with the Lunch Ladies, Vikki Greer, lunch lady at Hollywood Elementary in MacArthur, has been cooking for school children in the community. Greer inspires anyone who has a love for cooking and learning something new in the kitchen to sign up for her class.

“We’re cooks — we love to feed people,” Greer said.

“We’re starting to lose that family time of sitting around the table. I’m hoping my class will encourage people to eat as a family again.”

Greer insists that in cooking, you can always use someone else’s opinion. All participation in her class will be hands-on because she doesn’t believe you learn as much by sitting back and watching.

Greer’s goal is to “not only teach a class, but hopefully make holiday cooking a little better.”

If cooking is your forté, you may also want to try out the International Cuisine class that will be instructed by students who came to the area from other countries. In this class, participants will learn how to make dishes from students in the ESL class while being supervised by an instructor.

“The cool thing about the International Cuisine class is, our ESL students come from diverse countries. You will learn cooking from their homeland,” says Terry Farley, adult education coordinator for the Academy of Careers and Technology.

In the Video Game Design Concepts class, participants will get to create their own unique video game. Students will design an original story board and go through the entire process of animation and making a game “live.”

Other classes being offered include Beginning Bank Teller, Creating Primitive Christmas Ornaments, Not your Garden Canning, Quilting 101, Cross Stitching for Beginners, Preparation for the LPN Exam, CPR, Aerobics, Sign Language, Painting, Computer Basics and Line Dancing, among many others.

When coming up with ideas for these classes, Farley tries to be as creative as possible. Farley feels there are “not a lot of channels for people to get these opportunities.”

He would like to see more adults sign up for the community education classes and encourages people to sign up as soon as possible.

For more information or to register, call 304-256-4615, extension 305.

— E-mail: jayres@register-herald.com