Kids' Korner Gives Back

After school programs provide children with opportunities to participate in a wide variety of activities that provide children with the skills and support they need to develop into productive and healthy young adults. During the past two months, Kids' Korner sites have participated in a variety of community service projects that were developed by the children and facilitated by our caring staff members. These service projects have created opportunities for children and staff to positively impact the local community and are an excellent example of the YMCA mission in action.

To celebrate Veterans Day, the staff at Bielefield Kids' Korner read the book "A Veteran's Day Visitor" to the children. The book was about a young girl's grandfather who speaks to her class about Veterans Day and why the holiday is observed. The children then created cards to honor troops who were arriving home from Afghanistan. The students then asked if they could get all Kids' Korner sites involved in order to make sure that there were enough cards for all the troops coming home. The site staff made some phone calls and all the other sites agreed to help with this project. In November 400 cards were delivered to Camp Rell in Niantic to Connecticut Army National Guard troops that were back after being deployed in Afghanistan for the past year. Thank you to Ceara Ladue, site director at Bielefield Kids' Korner, for making all the arrangements for this project!

Snow and Spencer School Kids' Korner programs both held a Penny Wars Challenge at their sites during December. Penny Wars is a competition where the site is broken into teams. Each team has a container to collect change in. The point of the game is to have the highest amount of points in your container at the end of the competition. It sounds easy, but there are a few tricks to it. You want to put pennies in your container and silver change in your opponents container. Each penny is worth one point toward your end total. Silver change subtracts points from from your total according to their amount (-25 points for a quarter, -10 points for a dime, etc). Once the competition is over, the children and staff empty their containers, add up their penny points and subtract the silver change points from the total. The winner is the team who has the most points after all the silver change has been subtracted. The real winners of this competition were local Middletown families; the money raised was used to buy gifts for multiple families who were on the Middletown Park and Rec holiday needs list. Congratulations to all the children, staff and families at Snow and Spencer who helped raise around $350.00 to help local families during the holiday season.

Wesley School Kids' Korner took advantage of three early dismissal days to hold a bake sale at their school. For the past two years, the children at the program have held different events to raise money for local organizations that help animals. The kids created signs and fliers to advertise for the bake sale and Kids' Korner families donated all the cookies, cakes, breads and other delicious treats for the sale. The older children at the program worked the bake sale, perfected their sales pitch and raised $284.00! After the event was completed, the children had to decide what to do with the money. They decided to buy food for the animals at the Wallingford Animal Shelter because "animals don't need money, they need food". This project was truly a group effort and could not have been completed without the generosity of the Wesley School teachers and parents. Thanks to all the Kids' Korner families and children who made this a great success!

We are so proud of the fantastic staff, children and families at our programs! Check back with us periodically to see what's new at Kids' Korner. You can also find out more information about our Kids' Korner programs on Facebook by searching for Middlesex YMCA Kids' Korner.