Highlights from DC Elementary School Program

By Nadiah Widodo, DC Elementary School Program Teacher; Saadia Ahmad, DC Elementary School Program Coordinator; and Charles Kuo, DC Programs Manager

Photos courtesy of AALEAD Staff

The DC Elementary School Program recently had their first field trip of the year, and despite the rain and cold, our youth spend the whole day exploring. Our first field trip for this year at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore. For the last 2 months youth have been learning about different careers in the field of Science and got a hands-on interactive experience related to Earth Sciences, Physics, Space and Zoology to name a few.

While field trip are absolutely exciting for our AALEAD youth, they also thrive at enrichment programming during their after school. Youth learn about career exploration, doing team building activities, learn about how to make presentation. This month, all youth were introduced to the term nutrition and the importance of eating healthy and a balanced diet in correlation to mental health. Youth were able to understand different food groups and categorized them. They learned about nutrition labels and created their own balanced meal for a day consisting of breakfast, lunch and dinner incorporating almost all food groups.

It’s safe to say that our ES youth are now pro (almost) at reading nutrition labels at the back of the packaging. We also discussed about making healthy choices vs consuming junk food and what impact sugar and a balanced diet can have on them. Youth were able to correlate mental health to nutrition and discussed how a balanced mood and feelings of well being can be protected by ensuring that our diet provides adequate amounts of complex carbohydrates, essential fats, amino acids, vitamins and minerals and water.

Stay tuned to check out what other AALEAD programs have been up to this November!