Let's Move!
Childhood obesity or excess weight threatens the healthy future of one-third of American children. Obesity rates tripled in the past 30 years, a trend that means, for the first time in our history, American children may face a shorter expected lifespan than their parents. Join First Lady Michelle Obama, community leaders, teachers, doctors, nurses, and parents in a nationwide campaign to tackle the challenge of childhood obesity. Let's Move has an ambitious but important goal: to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation.

The Rhode Island Farm to School Project

This statewide project is designed to bring Rhode Island farm products (fresh fruits, vegetables, and Rhody Fresh milk) into all RI school districts within the next two years. This collaborative effort includes many members, and is hosted by Kids First, a Rhode Island non-profit organization committed to guiding communities to improve the nutritional and physical well being of children.

Paths to Inclusion: A Resource Guide for Including All Youth in Community Activities

Welcoming youth with disabilities into your afterschool program may be as much an issue of attitude as logistics. This guide helps youth workers and community volunteers make sure their programs are fully accessible to all youth.

April is National Poetry Month!

Poetry does not have to be stilted, arduous, or boring. In fact, it's quite exciting, creative, and jaw dropping. Use the month of April (and the rest of March, too!) to introduce to your children and youth the beauty of the written and spoken word. Here are some teaching tips and strategies you can easily incorporate into your program.

Adolescent Literacy Development in Out-of-School Time: A Practitioner's Guidebook
A corresponding report of Time to Act: An Agenda for Advancing Adolescent Literacy for College and Career Success, a capstone publication of the Carnegie Council for Advancing Adolescent Literacy (Council). This rich, comprehensive report offers key characteristics of afterschool programs that foster adolescent literacy and skills, examples of promising programs across the nation, and very useful appendices.

Thinking about Summer Learning: Three Perspectives
Over the summer, many students forget some of what they have learned during the school year, but "summer learning loss" is particularly severe among low-income youth, and a leading cause of the achievement gap between them and more affluent students. Recently, The Wallace Foundation asked leading experts in the field of summer learning to explore how summer programs could be a solution to this problem and how they could be better supported, improved and made more available to the children who need them. Three reports were the result: Effective and Promising Summer Learning Programs and Approaches for Economically Disadvantaged Children and Youth, It's Time for Summer: An Analysis of Recent Policy and Funding Opportunities, and Building Quality in Summer Learning Programs: Approaches and Recommendations.

SciGirls, a new PBS Kids television series
An upcoming brand-new science show for–and about–tween girls! SciGirls will spotlight girls across the country using science to make a difference. Whether it’s investigating the safety of drinking water in a rural community; engineering “green” products for their friends and family; or helping migratory animals reach their destination safely, girls are using science to achieve goals, solve problems, and help others. We want to find these stars, share their stories with a national audience, and demonstrate that great things happen when girls get creative with science. To keep up with series development, visit their blog: scigirls.org.

Teaching Tolerance
Dedicated to reducing prejudice, improving intergroup relations, and supporting equitable school experiences for our nation's children, Teaching Tolerance provides free resources (magazine subscription, films) to professionals working with children and youth.

Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media
Edutopia has created this highly useful 13-page guide, which provides many succinct and practical ways to turn your classroom into a 21st-century learning environment.

SEDL Afterschool Training Kit
When it comes to professional development, a common complaint from afterschool leaders is that they lack the time or money for training. While it may be tempting to abandon professional development, a well-trained staff can have greater success in offering activities that will improve student and youth achievement. SEDL’s free training kit can help deliver professional development in as little as 15 minutes a week (for instance, during staff meetings). The toolkit has six content areas: literacy, math, science, the arts, technology, and homework help. Each content area includes the following components: information about the role the subject plays in afterschool, promising practices, sample lessons, and resources and references.

Peace One Day
This UK organization has launched an Education Resource which aims to advance active learning in the areas of conflict resolution, global citizenship, human rights, and the link between sustainability and peace, using the UN International Day of Peace (September 21) as a focus. Schools and youth groups across America will be using this free multimedia resource to plan intercultural activities in celebration of Peace. It is a multimedia program and accompanies the film The Day After Peace, enabling teachers, organizations, and individuals to have access to 19 student-centered lesson plans and 26 classroom resources. There has been amazing response--one student from Rhode Island describing the program as “this will help every student participating feel more connected with the world that they are repairing, which is exactly what Peace Day is all about: installing a connection between every human in every corner of the earth.”

The Northeastern Girls Collaborative
This collaborative brings together organizations throughout Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts committed to informing and motivating girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The Northeastern Girls Collaborative provides the opportunity for programs to increase their ability to maintain interest and participation of girls in STEM within their regions through collaboration.

The Take Two Tandem Tellers
Introduce your students to the art of storytelling via a six-week Youth Storytelling program designed to enhance skills and self-confidence to tell stories. Take Two Tandem Tellers Anne-Marie Forer and Cindy Killavey delight audiences with their programs of songs and stories from around the world.

Rhode Island Mentoring Partnership 

Much like the membership of RIASPA, the RI Mentoring Partnership is committed to enhancing the lives of RI's youth, and accomplishes that goal through the support of mentor programs and partnerships throughout the state. Organizations interested in starting a mentoring program or already running one may contact this organization to learn about the free support it provides.
 

Baseball in Education
The Pawtucket Red Sox and Rhode Island College partnered to create a Baseball in Education curriculum guide. Using the game of baseball as a launching point, this guide serves as a learning "compass" and includes lesson plans for mathematics, science, language arts, and social studies.

Narragansett Council serves 21,000 youth in the communities of RI, Southeastern Massachusetts, and Southeast CT, 700 of which are served in afterschool programs. Their program is a unique relationship between community and religious organizations, parents, and leaders. Working together, they are able to focus the necessary resources and leadership on the single task of serving youth. The result is children, families and communities that are stronger and better prepared for the future.

Social Justice Math!
A new web site called RadicalMath has been launched to support K-12 math teachers in helping their students develop mathematical literacy through learning to understand and address community problems. Packed with over 750 standards-based lesson plans, articles, data sets, and graphs that are searchable by both math skills and social justice issues, RadicalMath is hoping to revolutionize the way that people think about mathematics education in this country.

The Algebra Project
The tagline of this web site is "math literacy is the key to 21st century citizenship." It provides resources and programs to improve the math literacy of minority students, including curriculum that is relevant to real life situations youth may encounter, professional development for educators, and advocacy at the national level.

Try Engineering! 
The IBM Corporation, New York Hall of Science, IEEE, and the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center partnered on this web site as a resource for students (ages 8-18), their parents, their teachers, and their school counselors to learn about engineering and engineering careers. They hope it will help young people understand better what engineering means, and how an engineering career can be made part of their future.

MentorPlace
IBM Corporation created a mentoring web site that matches adult science professionals with students interested in science careers. It's a very thoughful site with a boatload of interesting activities and tips.

Promoting College Access for First-Generation Scholars!
What Kids Can Do, Inc. has launched a new site for youth who are the first in their families to go to college. The web site provides advice for youth, resources on how to make the college application process less daunting, and planning checklists for students in grades 9 - 12.

Mind Your Own Business
The Small Business Administration has joined Junior Achievement in promoting youth entrepreneurship by expanding student activities on the Mind Your Own Business web site. New features include suggested group activities teaching the fundamentals of business ownership and a guide for volunteers assisting teens. Additionally, the site provides general information on how to begin and run a successful small business.