Many kids use the summer as a time to take a break from academics and relax.

But not New London native Shoshanna Phillips, who spent June and July working to make sure children in Baltimore don’t fall academically behind and are prepared when they return to school in the fall.

Phillips’ last assignment with Maryland Out of School Time (MOST) is part of her ten-month term with the National Civilian Community Corps, a program within AmeriCorps.

NCCC is open to people ages 18 to 24, and team members spend 10 months on various projects within a region, such as the Atlantic Region where Phillips is serving. It’s a full-time program that includes housing, transportation and food budgets, as well as $6,000 in scholarship money.

So far this year with her team Moose 4, she has helped clean up Girl Scout camps in the Chesapeake Bay area, build houses for Habitat for Humanity in the Hudson Valley and survey invasive species in Pennsylvania.

The 23-year-old said she first found out about the program through friends who said it would be a good fit for her because she likes helping people.

“It seemed like a productive way to spend time,” she said.

She and the other seven members of the Moose 4 team, so named because each team in the Atlantic Region is named after an animal, worked with kids in four Baltimore elementary schools. Each day, students listened to guests from local arts or environmental groups and made music, plays and more to help retain the information they learned from the guests.

The theme for the kids’ program was the Olympics, and Phillips said the kids were very excited to learn about the international sporting event.

They made cardboard box stadiums as part of the lesson, but they also pushed themselves to learn more about what the colors of the rings stood for. Some even started playing pretend Olympics during recess.

“I was really amazed about how much the kids learned about the Olympics and how much they wanted to learn about it,” she said.

The Moose 4 team is spending the first two weeks of August in Allegheny National Forest conducting surveys on invasive species and cleaning up some of the trails. Phillips said her team are also building benches to put along the trails.

In addition to working with her own team, she was also selected to join a composite team to work with various agricultural organizations on Martha’s Vineyard in May and June. While there, she worked with The FARM Institute, an organization that connects people on the island to agriculture, and Thimble Farm, part of the Island Grown organization that gives farmers a space to grow their crops and learn more about their craft.

She said working with the hydroponics system at Thimble Farm was her favorite part of the “really awesome” trip.

Phillips spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid, including summer camps and doing homework outside, so outdoor assignments like the one in Allegheny and her first one at the Girl Scout camps in the Chesapeake Bay area were particularly enjoyable.

After she leaves the program, she hopes to travel and maybe pursue a wilderness education program, and she said her dream retirement job would be a ranger at a campground, state forest or Girl Scout camp.

She would definitely recommend the program to other people, not only because it provides scholarship money or a resume line but also because it’s a good opportunity to learn about yourself and the world.

“It’s just a really good way to give back to your community, to the country,” she said.

a.hutchinson@theday.com