Cesar Chavez Plaza looked pretty normal at 11 a.m. Thursday. People were sitting in the park across the street from Sacramento City Hall, eating their lunches under trees in the shade by the cafe.
But out of the corners of their eyes, the park patrons must have seen the single-file lines of children in multicolored shirts begin to trickle into the park. They must have noticed that the children's chaperones were working quickly to manage the distractible brood, which quickly became a crowd of more than 500 children.
But the size of the group was no surprise compared with what happened next:
All of a sudden, speakers boomed and the children, ages 5 to 12, of the Sacramento START summer program took their places for the "flash mob" performance they had been practicing since June.
A flash mob is a group of people who gather in a public place and stage what seems to be a random act of dancing or singing.
"It was a great learning experience for the kids – working on something day in and day out and walking away with something that might have been hard for them to do in the beginning," said Louis Ceriani, a program coach and mentor for Sacramento START, an after-school program run by the city Department of Parks and Recreation. "But through hard work, they were able to do it. We're hoping to do more of them through our regular schools in the fall program."
Sacramento START teamed up with local academic coaching company AceCadets' CEO Raymond Enriquez and the program's head choreographer, Jasen Almazan, to get the children moving through video dance tutorials.
"We were both program leaders for the START program, so we know what these kids go through on a day-to-day basis," Almazan said. "A lot of kids don't have an opportunity to use their creative side on top of what the tutoring service provides."
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