Education & Classes in Coolidge

To get started, peruse Entrées to Go's menu of classic American, Asian, and Italian dishes. The menu changes each month, but December entrees include chicken marsala, almond encrusted tilapia, and tomato basil soup in a bread bowl. Once you've made your selection, call ahead to make your reservation. When you arrive, the friendly, accommodating staff will guide you to a preparing station stocked with all the ingredients you’ve requested, as well as optional surprise ingredients such as "love" and "Grandma's secret." The staff will show you how to assemble your two dishes just the way you like them. Pack them up and take them home for immediate consumption, or freeze them for future use either as sustenance or trebuchet fodder during castle sieges.

Group classes at Amy K Music Company fuse fugue fundamentals, such as theory and technique, with the fun of learning a popular song. Sporting bachelor's degrees and the chops to recite the Pledge of Allegiance on guitar and talk box, tune gurus impart their knowledge sans distortion to beginning and intermediate students ages 5 and older. Weekly one-hour classes for plucky portables require students to tote their own guitar or bass, but the studio does provide equipment for voice, keyboard, theory, and stage-pyrotechnics training. Guitar sessions convey basic for proper hand placement, strum rhythms, and facial contortions during solos, and music-theory lessons demystify major and minor keys, chord building, and scales from do to do and back again.

Arizona Music Academy is staffed with a conga line of talented virtuosos ready and waiting to implant heads with nuggets of musical knowledge. A four-day musical summer camp is a chance to escape the blistering heat of the day and spend hours learning or honing a skill instead of bursting into flames from the sun. Choose to percuss it up with drum instruction, pluck the strings of a guitar with increasing accuracy, or make liberal use of the instrument inside your throat box. Options include rock-guitar and drum camp, with sections for beginners (June 14–17, June 21–24, and July 19–22) and intermediate/advanced students (July 12–15); classical-guitar and hand-drum camp (June 28–July 1); and voice camp, which includes a Taylor Swift week for actual youth or the young at ear (June 14–17) and musical-theater week (July 12–15), featuring music from Glee, Hairspray, and more. Classes run from 10 a.m. to 12 or 12:30 p.m., depending on the type of class.

The Practical Chef schools fledgling foodies in an approachable environment with the added benefit of certified executive chef Craig Nassar's years of gourmet know-how. Hands-on classes ($65¬–$90) include all necessary ingredients and equipment—saving you the trouble of transporting your industrial-grade meat tenderizer by city bus—and offer a delightful repertoire of beginner and intermediate techniques open to all experience levels. Basic Cooking Techniques gets newbies up to speed on the nitty-gritty of browning meats, whipping up sauces, cooking grains, roasting root vegetables, and cooking leafy greens, while the katana-sharp Knife Skills class trains slicing sempais to mince, dice, and julienne with dignity and honor. Upcoming tutorials include pasta workshops, where students learn to fashion a variety of fresh noodles and seasonal sauces from scratch—an ethereal substance made from leprechaun hair, comet dust, and the residue of one’s first kiss. The Enticing Tapas class, meanwhile, covers an array of small plates provocative enough to inspire even the most bashful schoolmarm to flamenco her way across the gas range. At the end of each class, ravenous students get to feed on their freshly prepared meal before toting the recipes home for later replication.

Saguaro Aquatics' indoor and outdoor swimming pools double as recreational venues and classrooms. Instructors guide swimmers 6 months and older in group or private swimming lessons that cover the techniques for mastering strokes and growing gills. The noncompetitive synchronized-swimming club practices their aquatic art form twice weekly, and boot camp participants jump in and out of the pool for boxing, cardio, and swimming exercises. During Kids' Night Out, little ones enjoy themed games, crafts, and snacks while a projector showcases a kid-appropriate movie on a 15-foot screen. The club recently expanded its portfolio to include the landsport tennis.

A small group of explorers stands beneath an open dome of night sky as pinpricks of starlight glitter against the expanse's dark blues and blacks. Each spot of light even seems to look much clearer from here—likely because the group is standing 9,157 feet above sea level. At the Stewart Observatory inside Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter at the mountain's summit, scientists guide visitors through the use of gear such as a 32-inch Schulman telescope—the state's largest public viewing telescope—to probe the far reaches of space to learn about celestial phenomena and take in magnified images of the universe just above.

Days and nights at the center bring a slew of learning experiences to budding astronomers. Accompanied by University of Arizona scientists, Discovery Days lead explorations of topics such as tree rings, hummingbirds, and meteorology, frequently beckoning students into the surrounding outdoors. During nightly SkyNights programming, groups summit Mt. Lemmon for a five-hour evening of dining and stargazing at the observatory. One-on-one time with heavenly bodies comes courtesy of Astronomer Nights, wherein site staffers grant singles or pairs lodging, private access to the Schulman telescope, and the chance to contribute directly to the field upon discovering a supernova, nebula, or handlebar mustache on the man in the moon.

Periodically, the scientific team also expounds on specific topics, such as digital celestial imaging, with the public in multiple-day workshops. Each participant builds on the Stewart Observatory's list of achievements since 1970, which include furthering infrared astronomy, surveying the moon for Apollo lunar landings, and searching for near-Earth asteroids.