A New Unit & the YESS Video Shoot!

Ava was the first to be interviewed- she did wonderfully!

This past week we had the special honor of having several of our students, parents, and classes filmed for a new YESS video. The video, which will be shown at our annual "Road to Success" breakfast on April 26th, details the lives of our young YESS scholars and the ways in which the program has impacted their lives (and the lives of their families, too!). On Tuesday and Wednesday we had a camera crew set up in our classroom to capture what it is we do here every day. Our mentors and mentees were so excited and proud to share their experiences with the crew, and I was so impressed by their honesty and accountability as they told their stories on camera. A special thank you to all who were involved in this process--we cannot wait to see the final result!

Brenna was the last to be interviewed, and also did a fantastic job.

Last week we began a new unit entitled, "The Future." Many of our mentors are looking forward to the career planning component of this unit, and some of our mentees are already realizing changes they can make now to be more successful in the future. We started out by discussing the link between accountability and having a successful future--we agreed that it certainly would be hard to be successful if one cannot be accountable. In this vein of thought we started to discuss the nature of a habit, and how habits effect our success. We broke it down to better understand that habituation is a simple form of learning, and once a habit is learned it becomes "routine." Here is where it got interesting, however, as we learned that there are 5 essential habits one should possess in trying to become more successful. They are: getting exercise; making wise food choices; getting 8 hours of sleep each evening; surrounding one's self with positive people; and having healthy communication skills. While some of our scholars do some of these things, no one person could say that they do all 5. This knowledge of habits really seemed to stick with our scholars, and many have said to me in the days since how they plan to try and get more sleep, or eat breakfast each day, or how they plan to find friends who like to eat lunch (many of our scholars barely eat during lunch, and most do not make wise food choices).

 Sue Lee speaks about why she choose to move so that her daughter, Kiki, could be in YESS.

Last week we also did a simple assessment on learning styles so that our scholars can better understand which study habits are most in line with their personal method of processing. Whether auditory, visual, or kinesthetic, our scholars recognized the need to adopt new ways of learning so that they can get the most out of their brains (and their time!) when studying. Since our assessment, I have had visual learners ask to borrow highlighters, kinesthetic learners ask to take stretch breaks, and have had some of my more reserved auditory learners volunteer more in class discussions. I am happy to see that many have seized this information and are already putting it to work!

PARCC begins this week for us at Shaw Heights, which marks the beginning of a stressful few weeks for our scholars. We will be working on stress relievers and other tools to use during the next couple of weeks. We have also sent out our mentor applications for the 2017-2018 school year, and I am proud to say that almost every single person who can come back into the program would like to. It will be a very selective process to be accepted as a mentor this year as we have so much interest--stay tuned!