Eldon, Missouri’s Upper Elementary School is home to an after-school program that’s not your typical child care operation. Children are provided a free meal, as well as access to a wide variety of activities.
“Our after-school program is called LEAP, the Learning-Enriched After-school Program. It operates morning programming, starting at 6:50 in the morning to afternoon programming, and it goes ‘till 5:45, 6:00 at night,” said Colleen Abbott, director of after school services for Eldon Schools.
On a normal day at LEAP, kids will participate in activities ranging from math-based exercises, like coding and robotics. to shooting arrows on the archery range set up in an elementary school gym.
Coding class is a favorite among LEAP students. Kids like 10-year-old Rya Collins love the opportunity to work with coding after school.
“My favorite part of coding is like all the work, like the coding stuff. It’s like you get to move things and make stuff move and stuff,” Rya said.
But LEAP’s impact on Eldon’s youth stretches far beyond the activities. Some of the math-based exercises like robotics and clouding, can be helpful in the classroom, and even make typical school work more fun. Just ask 10-year-old clouding student Jesse Browmlee
“It helps teach us about how the evaporation and how the water cycle does and how the sun heats up the water and turns it into a cloud,” Jesse said.
“So for example, within our robotics, like we talked about how they might take a math concept like geometry and the circumference of a circle. Well, that’s pretty — like that doesn’t necessarily make sense on paper, but when you actually have the circumference of a wheel on a robot, and you have to figure out how many rotations does it take to get from point A to point B, and then turn, and then lift up some things on a robot board, then those are the things that like, that’s very concrete,” Abbott said.
Abbott said that doing fun activities in a group setting also has an impact on the kids’ social emotional intelligence.
“So, social and emotional skills are one that we get all kinds of different opportunities to learn those things and so for example like who do a lot of team building we do a lot of conversations and explicit lessons about empathy and compassion and really working together, so we put in service components where kids have to figure out and decide what is it that they want to do and then move them into that area,” Abbott said.
LEAP parent and school board member-elect Jay Harms can see the progress that his 10 and 9-year-old kids have made with maturity, too.
When we started off, my wife and I were reminding the children ‘Hey, we gotta go, we got practice tonight. This is what we have.’ And now the kids are actually reminding us when they have activities. So it teaches them responsibility to make sure they’re getting where they need to be as well,” Harms said.
Multiple LEAP students said they’ve been more successful making friends than before they joined the program. 350 students are currently enrolled in LEAP, according to its website.