Today in Education Counts Michiana The Music Village Music Makers at Howard, Park Five Star Life featuring summit experiential learning, IYI kids count data book.

Shakescenes at the University of Notre Dame.

Education Counts Michiana is underwritten by Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, investing in education and economic development for centuries.

Supporting the past, current and future development of the Michiana region.

Community Foundation of Elkhart County.

Inspire good.

Kosciusko County Community Foundation, Where Donor Dreams Shine.

The Dekko Foundation.

Community Foundation of Saint Joseph County.

LaGrange County Community Foundation.

Nipsco.

The Beim Foundation.

Crossroads United Way, Serving Elkhart, LaGrange and Noble Counties.

United Way of Saint Joseph County.

Marshall County Community Foundation.

Ready to Grow Saint Joe Early Childhood Coalition and a Gift by Elmer and Dolores Tepe.

Thank you.

Welcome to Education Counts Michiana.

I'm your host, Sam Centellas.

Education Counts highlights programs and initiatives that are impacting how we teach, how we learn, and how we embrace education.

This program explores ideas in all education sectors; preschool through lifelong learning, K-12, post-high school and job advancement training with the philosophy that we should never stop seeking knowledge.

Find additional resources at WNIT.org and on the Education Counts facebook page.

First Step Making Music.

The Music Village in South Bend provides music classes for people of all ages.

Thanks to a new partnership with South Bend venues, parks and arts.

They are now able to bring those classes to places like Howard Park.

We take a look at how Music Makers is instilling a love for music in young kids during the summer.

Segment produced by Brent Fox.

With school out, the summertime offers the chance to try new things.

One thing kids can do is explore music at the Music Village.

Of course, in the summertime, everyone's schedule changes to some extent, right?

Kids are out of school, maybe people go on vacation and work schedule might change a little bit.

But, summer is also a wonderful opportunity to have additional enrichment programing that is difficult to do during the school year, especially for kids, because of course they can be in different places at different times and have a variety of programs that can happen throughout the day and after the school day as well.

And the new partnership is allowing more people in the community to join in.

The Music Village's Michiana Community Musical Arts Center and School.

And we pride ourselves on the array of partnerships that we have and have had over the years.

And one of the most important ones is with the City of South Bend and specifically Venues, Parks and Arts.

Because in partnership with VPA, we're able to get musical arts programing out into the community in a way that is more difficult just on our own.

So specifically, Howard Park being relatively new in the past few years, we're really excited to bring music makers as well as some other programing over to Howard Park in the future.

I am a licensed musikgarten teacher and I offer the class here.

I teach piano at the Music Village and Josh suggested maybe we could get our music makers class going.

So so far, unfortunately, we haven't been able to do that here.

But hopefully now going to Howard Park will draw the children in for the summer and they'll see how phenomenal it is.

It's a wonderful way to kick off that partnership to offer such a robust program.

Melinda was allows she does a great job.

She is an expert in children's music education.

And so this is a wonderful and robust way to start our partnership with VPA and directly with Howard Park.

Howard Park is a beautiful facility and to be able to join in with the music village and bring music to the community out there I think is fantastic.

Kids in the Music Makers program get to try a variety of instruments and participate in different music based activities.

They will play a variety of instruments.

Drums is mainly it; rhythm sticks, jingles, that kind of stuff.

I concentrate on rhythm and solfege.

They'll learn solfege, do-re-mi and all that kind of stuff.

They'll learn to listen, really listen with their ears to the different sounds.

Everything has a different sound and we have fun.

We just read a book and we'll base the music program on the book, or we'll do a song and base the lesson on what that song was talking about.

Music makers and other music programs at the Music Village offer kids and adults the chance to experience the music that exists all around them and take those even greater lessons into their everyday lives.

It's a really great program that teaches children, but at the same time having a whole lot of fun.

And I feel in a way that I have the best job in the world.

I get to bring music through the music village out to our community and help build community through music, which is our mission statement here at TMV.

So, you know, everybody relates to music and experiences music to some extent in a different way, whether you play or whether you sing, whether you're just an avid music fan of any genre.

Music is a great way of being alive, quite frankly, of enjoying and experiencing the emotions that come with music, but also in sharing and giving music to other people is such a wonderful thing.

And in a large way, that's what TMV is all about.

Music teaches language, math.

It incorporates a whole bunch of different aspects of--of life.

I mean, in music--music comes naturally to these children.

I mean, they're always moving and singing and dancing, but they can apply it.

There's a lot of math in music, so they'll have fun learning it.

Learn more about the program at WNIT.org.

Hands on learning; the mission behind Five Star Life is to give students tools to succeed in school, life and lower the dropout rate.

By training, character education, workforce readiness and experiential learning, students learn skills that serve them in any setting.

Summit Experiential learning helps kids acquire hard and soft skills at a three hundred acre training facility.

Videographer Naomi Taylor.

Editor Greg Banks.

The core of our program is our curriculum, right?

And so a part of what we do is we train our staff where we train educators to implement that curriculum on a consistent basis.

And that becomes the really the foundation of what kids learn.

Our mission is to change the face of culture by changing the mindsets of all the kids who come to camp, which seems kind of okay, cool.

That's awesome.

But it means way more than that.

Through our our core values, we have five, five star, five core values.

Respect, treating others the way you want to be treated, responsibility, taking ownership of our past choices, our current reality, our future dreams.

Integrity, who we are when nobody's looking, the real you.

Sacrifice, giving up something I want to do now for something better later on.

Delayed gratification or giving up something I want to help somebody else win or live a five star life.

And then the fifth value really, really encompasses all of them.

It's courage, which we define as just having the strength to do what's right, read the what's popular or comfortable.

Through those, we tie that into our curriculum for the season and really work to build students up in their confidence level, helping them figure out who they are, who they want to be as people find out what their aspirations are and just really pour into them being intentional with them.

Topically, we hit every thing that educators, mental health experts and parents would say our kids need from bullying to, you know, issues of race, identity, self-awareness, self-esteem, all those core things that kids need we're addressing them.

And then our entire curriculum is SEL based, which is an education term, but it stands for social emotional learning.

So all of our hard skills that we do at each rotation.

So here at camp, for example, we have, like, hatchet throwing or archery.

So each of those rotations have the hard skills, which is how to do--how to shoot a bow and arrow, how to throw a hatchet.

But then tied to it with our curriculum is our soft skills, which would be our video lessons, video curriculum that we do through that--that tie in each of our values.

My role with Five Star Life is connecting the community, connecting the schools, educators to programing via our video curriculum, which is implemented in schools throughout the country.

It is a social and emotional learning curriculum.

This implemented in five easy steps in the school systems.

So it's very minimum work for the educators and the implementation is very easy.

We all--we pretty much done all the work for the educators and they just implement it and it's usually done within like a half an hour setting once a week.

What do you guys got next?

Fishing.

Okay, we'll send them down there.

Can you guys all bring.

Can you guys all bring your rods up and gather on the firepit, please?

We've developed over years through research and best practices a curriculum that targets their mindset.

At the core of a kid's success or failure is an operating system.

And that operating system determines how kids look at themselves in the mirror, how they treat the people around them, their values, their work ethic, everything, their dreams.

So whether they're in a school setting, whether they're in a sports setting, or whether at summit, the core of our program is our curriculum.

Five star was one of the things that really just kind of got me through middle school.

It's where I made all my friends.

I found people who had like mindsets with me, which was really cool to figure out, okay, this is what I value.

It's really cool that you value this too.

So growing friendships, growing relationships.

Some of my coaches who I had when I was in middle school are still working here today.

So just getting to have that mentorship with them throughout pretty much from sixth grade all the way to, now, being a senior in college has just been really cool and consistent and is always a positive growing environment, which helps me to see as a future teacher how I want to approach like management in my classroom and who I want to be outside of that.

We received a grant from the Memorial Health Foundation early on in our organization to hire a clinical psychologist to track kids over a three year period.

What the research found was that the longer kids are in five, so the higher the grade drives, the less behavior issues they have and the better their school attendance is.

And since we've grown into video curriculum which basically teach implementing, like for the whole school, they're seeing discipline issues go down school wide, they're seeing better engagement from students.

And so it's become a game changer that is growing not only locally, but we're in multiple states across the country.

We are an organization with a huge mission.

I mean, we are changing culture.

And so with that, there obviously comes a lot of need there.

So there are just so many ways we want people to get involved because they see.

What we're doing, and they're passionate about it and they want to just be a part of the change that we're making.

See you, guys.

Hey, finish the day strong.

Okay?

See you.

Find out more about five star life at WNIT.org.

Data Crunching.

The Indiana Youth Institute Kids Count Data Book offers a detailed look at how counties are doing when it comes to the overall well-being of children.

To help organizations and community leaders understand what the data means, IYI hold special events.

We learn what this information means and how it can be used.

The well-being of children is important to monitor, but it takes a lot of time and involves the collection of large amounts of data.

To help those who need that information, the Indiana Youth Institute releases its annual Kids Count data book.

This is a glimpse into how Indiana's kids are doing overall.

So when it talks about how many kids we have in Indiana, then it breaks it down into four really big buckets looking at education, economic well-being, family and community and health to say really how our kids are doing and helped provide some background information and data points to substantiate those rankings.

The State of the Child brings together the most recently available data on the well-being of youth in four domains; health, education, economic well-being and family, community.

And it equips community leaders in youth serving organizations with the data to be able to inform decisions, to have something that they can go to, to be able to build plans and their case and understand the issues that are facing kids on a state level, on a national level, but also on a community level.

At the most granular level, youth serving organizations use at once, most often to get grants and to substantiate and kind of--kind of show that what they're doing, how it's connected to the bigger picture of child well-being.

So we encourage people this is an easy way for them to get, kind of, data at their fingertips.

All of our--the entire--the entire data book, it's like 200 pages, is available online.

So you can go on there.

You can go right to the section you're most interested in, and you can also cut and paste a lot of the graphs and charts.

So that can be very, very helpful to youth serving organizations.

The goal for today is to spark curiosity, helping youth workers and youth serving organizations be curious about diving into and better understanding the issues that are facing kids.

And by doing that and equipping them with tools, they're able to utilize and create data, these data driven decisions to make better plans, to build a better case and to ultimately improve the well-being of kids in Indiana.

We also know that policymakers look to it when they're talking about whether that policy is a school board or city council or state legislature.

They turn to it to say, do we have the facts?

How do we get the facts quickly, easily, and from a reliable source?

So we know that it's both-- used both at the policy as well as the local direct service level.

Data is hard.

It's hard.

It comes from so many different places.

It can be confusing.

And so our team and our volunteers at the Indiana Youth Institute go through a rigorous process to vet the most recently available validated data to be able to help make it easy for folks to make data driven decisions.

A unique feature of the digital data book is the ability to see a county by county snapshot.

We know that it's important to look overall at the state and to say How--how is everyone doing?

But you also want to know how our kids and my community doing.

So you can hop on our website, which is IYI.org and drill down at the community level.

They're called county snapshots and you click on there, you choose the county you're most interested in and then it'll give you an overview of how that county is doing relative to the rest of the state.

Every community is unique, and so the data book and the county snapshots allow communities to really drill down into their community specific data, to shine a light on the issues or the challenges that our kids are facing and then make decisions.

It also allows them to look at year over year, comparison around how data points are shifting.

The best way to know if things are moving in the right direction is watching the trends from one year to the next.

Every year we go through this process to make sure that the most recently available data is available so that we can see the trends, so that we can see what new issues are popping up, where we're falling behind.

We're comparing ourselves to--to ourselves, but we're also comparing ourselves to our neighboring states and across the country.

And looking at that data on a regular reoccurring basis allows us to have that visibility into into where we're trending in overall child well-being.

We spend a lot of time and effort and energy serving kids, and we want to see, are we moving the needle and where--where are those efforts paying off and where might we need to lean a little further?

Where might we need to rethink and devise perhaps some new services and supports that are out there?

So understanding how we're moving the needle and and where additional needs are really can and should be data centered.

Learn more at WNIT.org.

What does Shakespeare have to do with schoolkids?

Shakespeare at Notre Dame offers elementary students the opportunity to perform scenes from and inspired by Shakespeare.

The program is called Shake Scenes, and this family friendly interpretation of art is an innovative way to bridge the gap between Shakespeare, students and the stage.

Videographer Donavan Barrier.

Editor Greg Banks.

To be or not to be, that is the question.

You should not be able to, like, rush.

So Shakescenes is one of my favorite things.

What it is, is a series of different scenes where people take Shakespeare and they make it their own.

And oftentimes it's geared towards younger people, because I think younger people see more possibilities for Shakespeare.

When we're older, we just expect, you know, 'Oh, Shakespeare, we're going to put him up on this pedestal'.

But when kids are young, I mean, I think about the different scenes that I've seen with like Shakespeare, Clue, the murder mystery scenes, or let's just take them and do like the best death scenes or the most romantic scenes where it really is taking Shakespeare and make it their own or taking it and giving it their own Shakespeare flavor.

Like there is be like a Star Wars running scene of Shakespeare that they would do.

That was like totally not something you would think of off the top of your head.

And we like our scene about women in Shakespeare claiming their own stories is, like, really important.

And I think that Shakescenes just like, opened so many horizons in the world of Shakespeare and just really--just there's so many different ideas that are so different.

This is true of theater in general, but especially Shakespeare, that there's this notion that it's an elitist institution.

But that's just, quite simply not the fact.

I'm a firm believer that the arts are for everyone, and that includes every single thing from Shakespeare to the most contemporary pieces.

So in order to try and combat some of those stereotypes and notions, it's really important for you to understand and begin to learn.

Shakespeare At this early age, the more that you can learn to appreciate.

High stomach'd are they both and full of ire and in rage as the sea, hasty as fire.

Like, before I really got in this program was I really thought it was like really boring.

But once I got into the program, I began to really be able to appreciate it more and really understand it a lot better.

Traditionally, only boys are allowed to feel angry and only girls can cry.

Traditionally, that's true.

But in our program, we allow kids to have those feelings in a safe way through different characters.

And for me in my program, I make my most beautiful girls the worst people.

I make them villains because I know that someday they're going to have to walk into a room full of people who don't look like them and say something unpopular.

And I want them to get used to to being appreciated for more than just being pretty.

I want my boys to be able to express themselves and their emotions.

And I've had students who have lost--who have lost people that they've loved, who have gone through tragedies, and they can take Shakespeare and they've said that it's what they want to say, but they don't know how to say it.

As with any performance, just learning how to public speak, how to interact with anyone, there's a huge amount of, like, collaboration, learning how to be a team player that comes from it.

As, for example, for my scene, there are five actors in there myself and there's a--there are six of us.

And all we had was text on the page and we worked collectively together in order to mount it up, to figure out what the scene was saying and to actually put together a short ten minute scene.

So I love the collaboration aspect of it.

I was not like a big public speaker or performer when I first started this.

Like being in this program for so long has really helped me with that.

I've had to do, like, speeches for my English classes and like I've watched my classmates go up there and they're like struggling and they're stuttering and I'm like, 'Oh, this is easy'.

So, like, I really think this is helped me with that.

Also, I can, like, read Shakespeare now and understand Shakespeare.

So that's, that's great.

I continue to learn a lot about other people and how different kinds of acting and being able to use that in my own life and my own, like, work as an actress has been really interesting because yeah, it's a super diverse group of people in so many ways who participate in shake scenes, so I've been able to learn a lot from different kinds of people, and I've really enjoyed that.

One of the reasons why I think that we should always study Shakespeare or we at least have the option to do it, is because when you see other plays like Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill is, you see the world through their eyes.

It's through their lens.

But with Shakespeare, we can take it and put it through our eyes.

We can put Shakespeare on Mars.

We can do Richard the second and make him an influencer.

We can take The Tempest and make it anime, but there's so many different things we can do with Shakespeare.

But it's like passing out a coloring sheet to everybody.

If you pass out a coloring sheet and you give them different colors, you're going to get these different things back.

And so for our kids, for our community, who sees things through different eyes, they're constantly going to come back and bring more things to Shakespeare to make it richer, brighter, more beautiful.

And one of the things that I have always loved about this organization is that it's--it's where it's really service oriented and especially with the students who come on campus.

One of the most important things is that you pursue your passions.

And the other one, it would be it provides a really, really great atmosphere to do that.

So I think it's only natural with a service first organization and with one that allows creative expression and to have a Shakespeare program.

We see here in Shakescenes.

It's all about providing an educational opportunity to the youth.

It's right in line with Notre Dame service mission.

But also just the arts are a passion that many of these kids have.

And for some of them, it's the first exposure that they're going to have to the Bard and the theater as a whole.

And it's important to give these kids all the opportunities that they can possibly have in order to discover whether or not that's something they want to do later in life.

So, I think aligns perfectly with the mission of the school.

If you're unsure about getting up on stage, it's a great way to start out because the audience is full of family and friends.

And so it's--and it's the theater might seem big, but it's not too big.

And it's just everything is right.

If you want to learn about theater, learn about Shakespeare, and, yeah, make new friends, because there's so many amazing people who are part of Shakescenes.

I look at being on stage as one of the great equalizers, one of the great levelers like that and playing chess.

Because it doesn't matter who you are, what your parents do, how much money they make, what school you go to when you're on stage, everybody's equal.

That everybody has that fear.

But you let it go.

And that bonds you when you have that felt experience with other people.

Check out WNIT.org for information on all these stories.

Thank you for joining us and education Counts Michiana.

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The success of every student matters.

Education Counts Michiana is underwritten by Pokagon Band of Potawatomi.

Investing in education and economic development for centuries.

Supporting the past, current and future development of the Michiana region.

Community Foundation of Elkhart County inspire good Kosciusko County Community Foundation Where Donor Dreams Shine.

The Dekko Foundation.

Community Foundation of Saint Joseph County.

LaGrange County Community Foundation Nipsco.

The Beim Foundation.

Crossroads United Way.

Serving Elkhart, LaGrange and Noble Counties.

United Way of Saint Joseph County.

Marshall County Community Foundation.

Ready to Grow Saint Joe Early Childhood Coalition and a Gift by Elmer and Dolores Tepe.

Thank you.

This WNIT local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.