Another enjoyable and successful week of Mini-Milers! This week thirteen children participate, including five who were attending for the first time and fourteen mentors. Partnering with our participants and donating their time on a Saturday were an assortment of UVM and high school students, including six from the UVM Women’s Hockey Team. Sarah Kelly, Sammy Kolowrat, Taylor Willard, Alyssa Gorecki, Rachel Khaulof, and Daria O’Neill, and , teammates of Kayla’s via Team Impact, were a great help, like the other volunteers, in assisting the special needs child they were paired with.
This session, following our greeting we all went around and pretended to be different animals. The idea is that some animals run slow and some really fast. Watching the children go as slow as a turtle and then run like a lion was encouraging and especially entertaining as the mentors got into the animal character. As an incentive for the kids to run/walk around the track as many times as they could, we had them collect rubber bands along the way. The children loved it! It was such a great motivator that at the end of the session we added all the rubber bands and determined we had done 50 laps. The kids liked it so much that we are going to track the “rubber band count” on a weekly basis to keep them motivated.
We ended our session with the relay race which the all the kids enjoyed and with a healthy snack! Another fulfilling week – four more to go!