For Clement Watson, a teacher assistant at Mack Benn Jr. Elementary School, woodworking is a hobby he enjoys at home.

But at the Learning and Enrichment for Academic Progress program, or LEAP for short — the school district’s revamped elementary summer school — Watson is bringing his skills to the classroom.

“We take a pile of junk wood and we make projects out of it,” Watson explained, as his students, during an afternoon “enrichment session” at the Mack Benn-housed summer school, gathered around a table to learn how to fashion jewelry boxes, flower boxes and butcher blocks.

The enrichment sessions are a cornerstone of LEAP, which Suffolk Public Schools has partnered with the United Way of South Hampton Roads to present. Held after lunch and extending the day from four hours to six hours, the idea is to reward students for studiousness during the morning’s academic lessons.

The first step in recycling cast off wood into useful items, Watson teaches his charges, is to come up with an idea. Then, he tells them, one takes that idea and puts it down on paper, before putting it into action.

“I was really surprised that they were excited doing work like this,” Watson said. “Most things these days are on the computer. They like putting their hands on it.”

Elsewhere at Mack Benn, Britney Williams, a teacher with Southeastern Cooperative Educational Programs, showed a group of third- and fourth-graders how to turn tissue paper, glue and a balloon into a paper mache globe. They also made hot-air balloons and recycled plastic bottles into fish.

“I think it cools them down,” Williams said of shifting gears in the afternoon to things that are more fun. “They actually look forward to it. They are excited by the time they come to my room.”

While the summer school has the capacity for up to 510, attendance on Tuesday was 443 students, said Catherine Pichon, LEAP principal.

“We had 510 registered in the beginning,” she said, adding that for a variety of reasons — impromptu family vacations, for instance — numbers later dropped off.

But parents are still calling every day trying to enroll their kids, according to Pichon, and 60 students from the wait list were added just last week.

The numbers attending LEAP are a significant increase on the 300-odd that Pichon said attended the old elementary summer school.

As well as two more hours a day, this year for the first time elementary students are also experiencing a summer school that runs for six instead of four weeks.

This week marks the end of the first three weeks, Pichon said, and when students return for the second three weeks, they’ll experience a different enrichment session.

“I think with this program, they look at it as more of a summer camp,” she said. “They get that learning experience along with the enrichment.”

The academic program has a bunch of health and wellness activities built in, Pichon said. For instance, each teacher has a health fact of the day, and students take regular brain breaks to help keep them on track.

“In the middle of the day, you will see kids doing exercises,” she said. “I think we just made it more fun and engaging for students.”

Pichon says attendance has been good, and she attributes that, at least in part, to giveaways each week rewarding perfect attendance.

“This week we’re giving away movie passes,” Pichon said, who added that teachers are also being rewarded for showing up each day.

Other enrichment activities under way around Mack Benn on Tuesday afternoon included Tessa Maynard’s knitting lessons, while the boys sat around a table at the other end of the room making miniature items of furniture out of popsicle sticks.

There were also some high school students helping out, including Ben Kincaid and KaRon Wiggins, rising ninth-graders at King’s Fork High, and Miles Watts, a rising ninth-grader at Churchland High School.

The common goal of all the LEAP teachers and volunteers, according to Pichon, is to reduce the summer learning loss.

“We want the kids to be better prepared when they start school in September,” she said. “We want the teachers to be able to start right from day one, and have less remediation to take place at the beginning of the year.

“We also want kids to have a great summer. We are trying to do both.”