The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Cardinals helping kids
New partnership allows college students to teach grade schoolers
MIDDLETOWN — Local children are taking flight alongside Wesleyan students in a new program known as Cardinal Kids.
Cardinal Kids gives Wesleyan students an opportunity teach children in grades 1-5 about a subject area they are passionate about at the RJ Julia Bookstore on Main Street in Middletown.
“They come up with their own lesson plans based on classes they are taking at Wesleyan,” said Lauren Coleman, children events coordinator at RJ Julia. “If you’re an art major, you come here and you do a world art class. It’s from all different disciplines.”
Jenny Chelmow, a senior at Wesleyan, started the program in January with the help of three other Wesleyan students. One of the students received a grant from the university in the spring of 2018, which was put toward the founding of Cardinal Kids.
Chelmow volunteered regularly at Green Street Arts Center, at an afterschool program for children living in the North End of Middletown, but it ended in June 2018, according to the Wesleyan website. Chemlow initially hoped to use the grant money to create a similar program at Wesleyan, but ran into several obstacles.
“After a long and drawnout process with the school administration and the school’s legal team, they decided they did not want kids on campus because they didn’t want to handle liability,” Chemlow said. “They told us we had to partner with an external organization that could shoulder liability.”
That organization was RJ Julia Bookstore, which represents Wesleyan but is owned by a larger corporation. Coleman said the bookstore was eager to take on Cardinal Kids because it was a link between Wesleyan, the bookstore and the community.
“One of the main reasons Wesleyan opened its store on Main Street was to share its resources,” Coleman said. “And one of its major resources are its students. And they’re sharing their resources with the community.”
The program, which meets twice a week, has featured topics such as hip hop, journalism, environmental art and DNA testing.
The lessons serve as a fun and educational experience for the children as well as the Wesleyan students teaching the programs.
“You’re learning something but when you’re explaining it to someone else, you own it,” Coleman said. “They’re learning this information and then they’re teaching it which is compounding their knowledge.”
Chelmow said her original goal in starting the program was to fill the gap Green Street left in the North End, but Cardinal Kids has taken on a whole new purpose.
“It was in the North End, you got the North End kids, the kids who really needed the extra help and we really did want to target that same population, that was our main goal,” Chelmow said. “We do have a large socioeconomic range coming to our classes, but it’s not necessarily just the North end kids we were looking to get at first.”
Amanda Martinez is a parent who has been bringing her 6-year-old daughter, Alli, to Cardinal Kids since the first session with only two other participants. Since then, the program and her daughter’s love for it have grown.
“It gave her an outlet,” Martinez said of her daughter. “I noticed that her behavior got a lot better going to the program because it gave her that outlet every week. Whether there was only one other kid or seven other kids, it’s stuff they aren’t doing in school.”
Martinez said one lesson that stood out to her and Alli was on journalism because it gave Alli an outlet to tell stories.
“We were having some problems with her in school as far as storytelling. She’d come up with these outrageous stories that weren’t true,” Martinez said. “The very first class that they had was a journalism class. She was able to put whatever stories she wanted to tell down on paper.”
The program is also allowing Wesleyan students an “outlet” to expand on the material they are learning in the classroom. Wesleyan did not offer education courses until recently, according to Chemlow, but many Wesleyan students are interested in teaching.
“This was a great opportunity to give students this experience of working with young kids and teaching a class and building syllabi,” Chemlow said.
Chemlow, who will be graduating in the spring, hopes the Cardinal Kids, like Alli, will continue to fly high next year without her leadership.
“I hope they will be able to extend to a larger population and that will see some faces from Green Street,” Chemlow said. “I hope we will be able to incorporate more tech into what we are doing – get our name on the map, get more variety of classes, get more variety of kids.”
The next session of Cardinal Kids is on March 26 from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at the RJ Julia Bookstore and it will feature origami.
Class is free but registration is required. Email books@wesleyan.edu to reserve a space.