Breakfast Club Blog
The BOOST Breakfast Club Blog is a curated space where bloggers from around the world contribute content on a continual basis about a variety of topics relevant to in and out-of-school time. The BOOST Breakfast Club blog is at the heart of an ongoing dialogue where expanded learning and education professionals share their personal thoughts and stories from the in and out-of-school time field. They also tell us what they ate for breakfast!
The BOOST Breakfast Club Blog is Brain Food for In and Out-of-School Time Leaders!
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Willing to Fight
This post originally appeared on the Breakfast Club Blog on September 20, 2010. I recently took a road trip up north to the bay area to congregate with about 70,000 like-minded individuals at the Power to the Peaceful concert. Road trips always seem to reignite the ‘rebel fire’ in my heart. My soundtrack included a number of folk songs that have never ceased to inspire me. As I began to listen to the lyrics of Ani Difranco’s Willing to Fight, I found myself a bit discouraged fo...Read More
Need an Attitude Shift? Try Gratitude in 2021!
“What a year!” That’s all we keep saying – “What a year it’s been!” And it’s true, it has been quite a year. This blog is about gratitude. I’d like to begin with some of the things that happened for me in 2020 so that I can lay out how powerful gratitude is and how gratitude has really has supported and shifted my mindset. There’s no other way to begin than with the real story. I lost my father to COVID-19 on May 8, 2020, in New York City. He was swept up in what I call the COVID Cyclone. The v...Read More
Making Sense with Stories
Let’s face it. None of us expected to be living in a sci-fi thriller during 2020: COVID pandemic, civil unrest, election disputes, distance learning, economic struggles, and the list goes on. How do we make sense out of the chaos? Stories. Bruno Bettleheim studied fairy tales, and he asserts that these fantastical stories offer children “ideas on how to bring their inner house into order.” Think of Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Ugly Duckling. These tales paint a picture of good ...Read More
Hi Miss Tiaaaana
Recently, I posted a picture of myself on Instagram, and to my surprise, I received likes from folks I have not seen in quite a while. One of them, a young lady who attended the middle and high school after-school program I managed five years ago, commented on the picture by saying, “Hi Miss Tiaaaana.” She shared photos of her daughter with me, and in one of our messages, told me that some other girls who attended 20 West wanted to reunite to catch up. Hearing that my old students wa...Read More
Find Your Happy Place
I write about energy – whether that is the electricity we use in our homes or the energy we exert when we are physically active. As the Residential Energy Program Manager for a County agency and a part time Aerobics and Laughter instructor, it is all I think about. So much so that if you look closely, you may seem steam coming out of my ears. That is because I am always doing something. In fact, I have a problem saying no. I like to be helpful, I like to feel like part of a team, and I lik...Read More
BOOST Conference Dreamin’
We’re continuing our week-long celebration of the time we would have been together in Palm Springs for the 2020 BOOST Conference. Today, we hope you’ll enjoy these highlights and reflections from BOOST Conferences past. This post originally appeared on the Breakfast Club Blog on December 18, 2015. It’s about this time of year when the cold starts setting in, holiday lights start going up and everyone is busy making their plans for the big holiday that I find myself drifting off...Read More
Being a Change Agent in Quarantine
With both in-person schooling and programs moving online, I didn’t have the resources at the time to transition to fully relying on digital platforms. I had adapted to having hands-on experiences and collaborating with other students in the same space to advocate for student voice and BIPOC communities. As a Gem Project fellow, I was really worried about how engaging the program could still be and how much I’d be learning about youth activism if our resources are limited. But The Gem Project’s e...Read More
Persistence: Why It’s Hard Before It’s Easy
I’ve written about this very thing before, but I’m struck once again at how HARD things are before they become EASY. My son and daughter took a few rounds of swimming lessons this summer. For my son, who only recently turned three, this was his first experience with swimming lessons, and they came at a time when he was only just beginning to enjoy just simply playing in the water. Here’s how the first round went for him: During his first lesson, he cried hysterically from the f...Read More
Cardboard Cut-outs, Story Time, & Makeshift Doc Cams: Creating Some Semblance of Normalcy
Last night our family assembled on the couch to watch opening day baseball. We donned our orange and black, took a few selfies, and watched our beloved San Francisco Giants be trounced by our biggest rival. An otherwise empty Dodger Stadium had fan cut-outs positioned in the stands most visible for the TV-viewing audience. They piped in crowd noise. Major League Baseball was trying to give the players and the fans as normal an experience as possible on opening day in July. Normalcy, or some semb...Read More
Gemstones in the rubble: Reflections on rediscovering our core values
In recent months people across all 50 states and worldwide are in the streets raising their voices and their fists to demand racial justice for our communities and world. The simmering heat of a robust Black Lives Matter movement added to heightened distress of the COVID-19 pandemic finally brought society to a boiling point. Yet it’s sobering to realize that we’ve been through similar uprisings before and still our moral sins persisted. How can we assure this time we will be different, th...Read More
Perseverance Pays – At Home and in Space
In these times, there are many lessons to be learned, for which afterschool helps kids both prepare and develop skills. One of them is perseverance – being steadfast in doing something despite difficulty or delay, or using grit to keep on going and recover in the face of trouble, great and small. Can you think of a time that you and/or your students have needed this skill or if you know someone who did? It also means keeping your eyes on your goal and vision, on what is important to you. Can you...Read More
An empty basketball court…
Prior to this spring, I had all of these ideas rolling around in my head about this next blog post. Would it be about standardized testing (a normal spring occurrence) or preparing your English Learner (EL) for summer? Would it be a post about connecting EL families to school and making them feel welcome? Then, around mid-March, we all began talking about something else… Did you see that they closed Italy? Did you see that there are COVID-19 cases in Washington State? Did you see they held that ...Read More