Today on Education Counts Michiana, Highlights from some of the best local initiatives and best practices in education.

Education Counts Michiana is underwritten by Community Foundation of Elkhart County.

Inspire Good Kosciusko County Community Foundation.

Where Donor Dreams Shine.

The Dekko Foundation Community Foundation of St Joseph County Crossroads United Way.

Serving Elkhart, Lagrange and Noble Counties.

United Way of Saint Joseph County.

Ready to Grow Saint Joe Early Childhood Coalition.

Thank you.

Welcome to Education Counts Michiana.

I'm your host, Sam Centellas.

Education Counts looks for 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.

This week, we highlight some of the best practices in education.

Family and Consumer Sciences Program, Curious Kids Museum Traveling Exhibit Glen Oaks Community College Healthcare Employment Fair Lost Sparrows Parent Support Group Cabin Fever Camp The August Wilson Project and Masonry Continuing Education Science for everyone.

The annual Science Alive event at the St Joseph County Public Library brings the community together to celebrate science education.

Dozens of organizations offer presentations and demonstrations across a wide range of scientific topics.

The event is a great resource for people of all ages to learn something new and explore their interests in the sciences.

Segment produced by Nathan Krebs.

It is so important to teach kids about science, technology, engineering and math.

So the library's leaders had the vision 32 years ago to start Science Alive.

And teaching STEM is just as important now as it was 32 years ago, possibly even more important.

All of Science Alive is really about getting kids excited to learn about science and technology, engineering and math, and so that they're more prepared to go back to school and be excited to learn STEM.

Yeah, for my table, we have skulls of different like humans, evolutionary like Homo Sapiens, a Homo Erectus, and they're all plastic.

So, you know, the kids can touch them.

They really like to look at like the teeth and stuff and ask questions like, Why is this like that?

I don't get it.

Well, today we are extracting DNA from strawberries.

And so this is really a very simple procedure that people can even do at home.

We use things that most people have already on hand.

So a mixture of water, just soap and salt to extract the DNA out of the strawberries and really break up the cells.

And we've had a little bit of rubbing alcohol in there, too.

We couldn't do Science Alive without these 41 local organizations.

And that's what makes Science Alive so strong, is that it's the whole entire community coming together.

It's everyone that's a specialist in in nature and science, coming together to teach kids and gets kids excited about learning STEM.

Oh, well, I'm sure that the demonstrations and the variety of different organizations here will only continue to grow.

I know that they had many more exhibitors this year than they had in previous years.

And so really that increase in variety and more organizations from different areas of the community coming together like this will really just increase the amount of STEM education to especially young children like this.

Look for extended versions of these stories at WNIT.org Ingredients for Success.

Jimtown High School offers a Family and Consumer Sciences CTE program where students learn more than just how to cook.

The program teaches students about the business of food service and working in hospitality and provides opportunities for culinary and entrepreneurial skill development.

Kristen Franklin Videographer.

Greg Banks, Editor We are Family and Consumer Science at Jimtown High School We have three class periods every day that second, third and fourth hour that our students grades ten through 12 take, and they take it all year.

So we start very basic.

Usually our very first lesson that we do is food safety.

So students learn how to practice good handwashing, why it is important not to cross contaminate what are safe cooking temperatures for food.

From there we go into kitchen safety and then knife safety.

I think it's important for our students to learn those three basic skills because that is the foundation for being able to navigate in their kitchen at home.

We were doing our unit on corn meal, so we made corn muffins today and it was pretty easy.

It just was a time consuming lab of corn muffins.

Well, you got to measure the dry ingredients, put them into a large bowl, and you mix the liquid, the ingredients into a smaller bowl, mix those together, and you combine them, and then you mix those together, and then you pour the muffins into a muffin sheet and put them in the oven for 20 minutes.

I think it's really important to earn cooking skills in this classroom because one, you don't really have to go out and buy cheap food when you can make at your own house.

A lot of Elkhart County is in a food insecurity state where people don't have the ability to get to a grocery store.

Maybe they don't have transportation or maybe they don't have the finances for that.

So teaching these kids how to take, you know, a packet of seeds that's a dollar and turn it into something that is nourishing and wholesome for their whole family is a skill that they can use for the rest of their lives.

Not only that, but just being out in the soil, in the dirt and things like that.

It seems to have a therapeutic effect on the kids that's been really beneficial to our community.

Kids learn best through hands on, and I really think that that's part of the reason why this class is so important.

And it's really popular in our building because they like to be active in the classroom.

They don't really just want to sit there and listen to someone lecturing all day.

They like to be able to be hands on and then end up with the finished product.

They know now that if they want to cook for themselves at home, that they can look up a recipe and follow a basic recipe and use basic skills in their kitchens.

Learn more at WNIT.org Interactive experience.

The Curious Kids Museum in Saint Joseph and the Whirlpool Foundation collaborated to design a traveling interactive exhibit.

Children explore the inner workings of kitchen and home appliances through hands on activities and demonstrations.

The exhibit will soon travel to museums across the country and provide other communities with chances to learn and play.

I'm Lori Marciniak and I'm the executive director of the Curious Kids Museum and the Curious Kids Discovery Zone in Saint Joe, Michigan.

Kids spend their lives hearing Don't touch, don't touch.

Sit down, be quiet.

And in a children's museum, they get to touch everything.

They get to direct their own play.

They get to pretend the way they want to pretend and interact with the exhibit, the way they want to interact.

There's really not a right or wrong answer in a children's museum.

Certainly each exhibit has a prescribed way that you would play with it and learn from it.

But we want kids to explore and make mistakes and and figure it out on the next time around.

And so it really gives all the kind of power to the child to do what they want, how they want, as long as they're being safe and they can role play, they can be the mommy or daddy, they can be the chef, they can be whatever their mind wants them to be.

It's amazing.

It's called secret ingredients.

We are so excited about it.

And it's all about home appliances and kitchens and all the familiar things that kids see in the home but can't really play with in the home.

So we've kind of made replicas of everything child size, and they can touch and play and learn about all the things.

So working with Whirlpool, I mean, we had to go back to early logos and early looks and feels of the kitchen.

And, you know, we have a pink refrigerator and Whirlpool had a pink refrigerator back in the fifties that they sold.

So it was so cool for us to see them pull from their archives, all of the historical information, and allow us to recreate those in a child sized play based environment.

It's been an incredible partnership, so we try to do everything hands on.

There's all kinds of different learners and we really want to give them the opportunity, but really to give them the power to do what they want.

And when you do that and you have moving parts, kids are just naturally curious.

And so they want to know how is how does that spin or why does that spin or why does this go up and down?

And so we give them all those opportunities, if nothing else, to observe, to watch others play, and then to jump in and do it themselves.

And it just starts to spark that curiosity of how do things work.

It's just something that is so familiar, familiar to children, the home and different appliances in the home, and to allow them to touch and understand and direct their play and then to give that our home, Whirlpool is their corporate headquarters, are in the city and they they do so much for the area.

And then to see that across the country and for everyone else to experience the Whirlpool appliances in the different areas of the exhibit is just going to be so gratifying to us and we'll be so proud to help bring that to everybody across the country.

Discover more ideas in education at WNIT.org Futures in health To help address health care needs in the region, Glen Oaks Community College hosted its annual Healthccare College and Employment Fair.

The fair is open to students and the public and attendees can build connections with employers and college representatives.

The event provides opportunities to learn more about health care, careers and education, and it makes networking with professionals more accessible to the community.

So this is the third annual health care college and an employment fair.

It's an opportunity for our health care agencies and college and universities in the area to come onsite to Glen Oaks and meet our students, our nursing and allied health students, as well as community members who are attending the event, make connections with, with those students and community members and reach out to them about future employment opportunities or transferring of for education, continued education.

I plan on getting my medical certificate this May, so I'm kind of looking for a job for that.

But along with that, I do plan on furthering for nursing.

So I'm also looking for opportunities.

It's really nice having them right here instead of having to like, you know, call or like look at different websites.

You can talk to someone personally and not just one person, but like everybody, like from Beacon to Goshen, Fairview, you know.

It's very important for our students to learn how to speak professionally with these potential employers, how to introduce themselves, shake the hands, provide a professional resume for employment for each of them.

We even have our business classes coming on down to the fair and with the assignment of introducing yourself professionally, shaking hands and having the initial professional contact.

Students being able to meet with the employers here.

Really is it makes that what they're reaching for that certificate or their degree is a little more attainable.

They can see, oh, here are employers and employers are interested and there really is a need for people like me, and I'm glad I chose, you know, an allied health or a nursing education.

And there are onsite interviews, which is fabulous because we last year we had some students who were actually hired.

There's such a huge, huge need right now for employers in the community.

So whatever we can do to fill it.

Be that students right now potential partnerships, building new programs if needed in the future.

So we're really happy to do whatever needs to be done in our community and for our students here.

For additional resources, check out WNIT.org Supporting families.

Lost Sparrows is an organization in Kosciusko County that provides resources and support for vulnerable children and their families.

One of Lost Sparrows' initiative is a monthly support group to help empower parents of foster and adopted children.

Parents learn from one another by talking about their experiences, and they also form strong personal connections.

So we are a small organization.

We transplanted here from the Southwest in 2019.

We work in Kosciusko County with foster, the foster system.

We work alongside DCS and a lot of other organizations trying to support vulnerable kids and families.

So our our and our mission statement is to empower and equip our community to to care for vulnerable kids.

When you trauma parent life is just different parenting.

It's a different type of parenting.

And so then COVID hits and all of a sudden we become isolated.

And so we we don't have the support networks that we had beforehand because we couldn't be around people.

So everybody's socially distanced.

And so so it was really kind of an easy decision to make to support, to start a support group.

Oftentimes, families feel unsupported or misunderstood by other families who are raising biological children.

And so having this support group gives these families a feeling of connectedness, a feeling of not being alone, and the feeling of support that they might not experience other places.

You know, it's always good because at the beginning we always have some professional or speaker speak into something that we that's helpful for us, just very hands on.

But mostly just learning to adjust, adjust our lives, adjust our our expectations.

I guess, to fit the needs of these kids.

I think it's I think it can be overwhelming for somebody to want to start a support group and they don't know how to do it.

It's it's powerful enough to just get people in the room and let them visit and talk.

You don't have to have any sort of curriculum.

That's not what makes our group powerful.

It's not it's not having curriculum that we follow.

It's just the fact that everybody appreciates being around everybody else.

And and over time, when you build relationships and then, you know, you get to know each other and you get to know the struggles that other people have, people are really vulnerable and because they need it.

Life's too short and too hard to not be so.

So that's what I would encourage people is go ahead and just start.

And you may start with three or four people and who knows where it'll go.

For full versions of these stories, Check out the WNIT website.

Community Service.

The La Porte County Public Library hosted its annual Cabin Fever Camp in partnership with the county's Community Youth Advocate program.

Teens who attended the camp work with adult mentors in different activities such as woodworking, 3D printing and sewing.

The items made from these activities are donated back to the community as part of the camp's goal to serve others.

So we are super excited to host, and when I say we, I'm talking about Family Advocates, and we are hosting a community youth advocate, a youth camp.

And one of the things that we wanted to do on this year's theme was to do a community service project so the kids are learning different skills through three different type of segments of community service.

So the woodshop area is really cool.

A lot of the lot of them like it.

A lot of them have already been trained on it and are excited to use it again.

They're making candles that will be attached to gardening tools, and then the tools will be donated to the State Street Garden here in town.

I learned how to sew.

I learned how to do handles on woodworking.

And then I also learned how to 3D print a little bit, which are not the best of programing anything.

But it's pretty simple.

And, you know, we made tools to help people in need that would need the help.

Like like, for instance, we made like a bag holder for people that have, like the best grip and we're making like the handles and inside just going to be donated to the community.

I would say that I'm proud of them and they're here willingly.

They don't have to do this.

They're coming because it's fun.

It's great experience for them.

They're learning a lot.

And what's also exciting is they can come back on their own after they're done.

And we do have a lot of youth that will come back here on their own and use the tools that they've learned.

We're so grateful that we get to do the work in our community because like tonight's camp is one of those fun things that help the kids find skills.

It's a give back.

They help learn that they're part of something bigger than themselves and that some of their history is is not their identity.

So they're able to find their potential through opportunities like this, and they're able to find a skill set that I believe will help and that they'll need down the road.

Find more ideas in education at WNIT.org History through theatre.

The August Wilson Project is a series of ten plays that highlights the African-American experience in each decade of the 20th century.

This year, the South Bend Civic Theater continues its presentation of the project, with the fourth installment, a drama of self-worth and personal gain set during the Great Depression.

The South Bend Civic Theater also offers educational resources for students and adults to learn more about the history and culture.

If you come up here thinking you're going to sell the piano unit, you've come up here for no This is the fourth play in the American century cycle.

You've heard us talking about these for a couple of years now, and we're going to do all ten.

But this is year four.

This is the first Pulitzer Prize winning play of the cycle.

There's actually two of them that won the Pulitzer, The Piano Lesson, and the play we'll do in two more years called Fences.

So The Piano Lesson is the play set in the 1930s.

In The Piano Lesson, you have a sister, Bernice, and you have a brother boy, Willie.

Boy Willie comes in like brothers and siblings and other families can do, just blows up the whole house with his attitude and who he is.

And he's a big kind of, you know, personality.

He wants a family piano.

He wants to take the piano and he wants to sell it and take that money with some other money he has put together to buy the land that his family, his ancestors had previously been enslaved on.

He wants to purchase that land.

This play in particular is a play about inheritance.

It's a play about the things we keep, the things we treasure as families.

And I think all of us have those things.

So it's a universal story.

In this particular case, it's a story of The Piano Lesson itself is about this treasured piano that has been passed down through generations.

And on this piano is carved the journey of this family through slavery, through the Great Passage.

When Aaron and I started talking about doing the August Wilson plays back in 2018 and we were talking to different community members about August Wilson's plays, everybody said "August Wilson, who?"

Knowing that a lot of people did not know who August Wilson was, we thought it would be a great opportunity to kind of educate and create teaching resources for the schools to use to that way, teach the students.

And then that way, when the students came to see the play, they knew who August Wilson was.

They knew what was happening during that decade in the United States in the African-American community.

And so we thought it will be a great teaching opportunity.

They really enjoy being around each other, and I think they're having fun.

And that's very important to me, is for them to enjoy this experience.

Yes, we're doing a play.

We want it to be a good play.

We want the audience, the community to enjoy the play.

But I also want the cast to enjoy being in the play and to want to do other things.

It's all about community and that's why it's South Bend Civic Theater.

Learn more about all these stories at WNIT.org Foundations for learning.

The Northwest Indiana Mason Contractors Association hosted its annual Continuing education event for professionals throughout the region.

Local college students, contractors and architects gathered to share best practices and work hands on with masonry equipment.

The event's goal was to upskill the contractor community through collaboration and shared learning.

Yeah, well, I love to see it.

I know some of us are competitors and we work against each other, but ultimately this is for the betterment of the masonry industry and improving buildings and how they're built.

It's nice to get the designers and the contractors together in one room and they can talk as well as learn some new techniques that are out there and improving.

So this is an annual event that the northwest Indiana contractors, our Northwest Indiana Masonry Contractors Association does.

They work in conjunction with the Midwest Masonry Council and they bring together experts that have AIA certification.

So the attendees that come here get credit for their AIA continuing education program.

From architects to engineers to contractors and subcontractors.

We really have a wide variety of different types of organizations that attend, and then we also open it up to students.

I'm learning about a lot of stuff when it comes to masonry, basically air vapor barriers.

What's the correct way to implement them?

What ways not to use flashings when it comes to CMU or bricks?

I would say it's very important, you get a lot of information, short amount of time, useful information.

Making those connections is just as important as what they're learning, and those conversations in between the sessions are probably just as important.

But having the event of this available to them while you're in school, this is real world learning rather than the textbook learning.

So they're learning applied applications today rather than the textbook application.

You might think that masonry is just laying brick, but it is so much more.

And there are new trends and changing developments that both architects and engineers and also contractors need to know about so that the product that is delivered to the owner is the very best that we can deliver.

The industry itself continues to expand and with new technologies and new flashings and new learning techniques, the goal is to really build a good building for an owner so they have minimal maintenance.

We don't want problems.

We want to build a good building and for it to last many years in order to do that, you have to constantly improve and learn.

Check out WNIT.org for more resources on these and other stories.

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The success of every student matters.

Education Counts Michiana is underwritten by Community Foundation of Elkhart County.

Inspire Good Kosciusko County Community Foundation.

Where Donor Dreams Shine.

The Dekko Foundation Community Foundation of St Joseph County Crossroads United Way.

Serving Elkhart, Lagrange and Noble Counties.

United Way of Saint Joseph County.

Ready to Grow Saint Joe Early Childhood Coalition.

Thank you.

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

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