Weekly Media Roundup  May 20, 2015

Kids and Yoga Make for Relaxing Combination at Showell (Delmarva Now, Maryland)

An afterschool yoga class at Showell elementary is improving student wellness and helping kids unwind after a long day in the classroom. During the 50-minute class, pre-kindergarten teacher Amy Braciszewski leads students through a variety of poses, teaching them each pose’s Sanskrit name along the way. Assistant principal Joshua Hamborsky thinks the afterschool program is teaching kids a good way to work through their problems. “It’s not fluff,” he told Delmarva Now. “The course offers powerful breathing, thinking and mental exercises to help students cope with anxiety and stresses.”

Kids Learn Fitness, Life Skills from Circus Staff (Bloomington Pantagraph, Illinois)

Twenty-three Cedar Ridge Elementary School students participated in a unique physical education class last week when Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey circus performers visited their afterschool program. A clown taught them about healthy eating and several other performers, including a dancer and four unicyclists, taught them to juggle, hula hoop and jump rope. “CircusFit is designed to get kids moving and show that exercise can be fun,” Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey’s Jillian Kaplan told the Bloomington Pantagraph. “Hula-hooping and jumping rope are everyday skills that children can become proficient at instead of sitting and playing video games.” Students even got a bit of a performance from the King Charles Unicycle Troupe, who shot hoops and jumped rope while on their unicycles.

Students Design Prosthetics, Compete for First Place at Oregon MESA Day (Oregonian, Oregon)

At the 15th annual Oregon MESA Day Middle and High School Engineering and Science competition, more than 350 students showed off the inventions they had created that year through their STEM-based afterschool program. Oregon MESA (Mathematics Engineers Science Achievement) targets students typically underrepresented in STEM fields, pairing them with mentors who help them develop projects to present at the year-end competition. One group of students from Franklin High created a prosthetic arm out of cardboard tubes, clamps, metal tongs and rubber bands, which they used to pick up and move items and fasten screws to a wooden board. “My touchstone is just watching the kids go crazy,” MESA board chair Kevin Bell told the Oregonian. “They walk away basically believing ‘I can do this.’ It’s contagious.”

MDC Students Mentor Children through Literacy Program (Miami Herald, Florida)

With the help of mentors from Miami Dade College (MDC), seven-year-old Diana Arellano wrote a story about reuniting with her sister in Mexico and ten-year-old Joan Espinosa created an action-packed graphic novel about superheroes, the Miami Herald reports. The students are part of Pages for All Ages, an afterschool literacy program for students from the large population of migrant farm workers and low-income families living in South Miami Dade. Each semester, kids are matched with MDC students who help them improve their reading and writing skills. The stories they create are then hardbound and displayed at the college library.