Creating Scholar Athletes: Tennis & Education

PAST&E's summer programming got off to a great start with our "Greatest Rivers of the World" educational tour. We started off in North America learning about the Mackenzie River in Canada, followed by the Rio Grande (called the Rio Bravo in Mexico) which runs through 3 U.S. and 4 Mexican states. 

Each day of learning is a divergence from what many students experience at school. We emphasize student led learning, where a student or group of students are presented with a challenge and can then experiment and find a solution on their own. We hope to enable each student to love investigating and coming up with creative solutions to simple and difficult problems alike!

Some of the other themes for the summer include: 

Plant and Animal Adaptations: What makes an animal suited to live in a particular habitat? 

Cultures: What makes a certain area unique? How do people live differently, depending upon their surroundings?

World Geography: How many countries can you name on each of the continents? Do you know any of the capital cities? Our students will be learning as many as possible this summer, increasing our knowledge of and familiarity with the world outside of Portland, OR!

Click on the links below to read the full articles about our first 3 weeks traveling the Greatest Rivers of the World!

And check out our map to see all of the destinations that we will "visit" throughout the summer!

Links:

• Serving Up Success Week 1: McKenzie and Rio Grande Rivers
• Serving Up Success Week 2: The Amazon River
• Serving Up Success Week 3: The Congo

Earth day is an incredibly meaningful day for Portland After-School Tennis & Education. We are always looking for ways to bring peace to our community and also spend a portion of our extended learning summer program learning about what we can do to save Endangered Animals and the Environment. 

This April we read about young adults and children who have made big changes in their world: one built a windmill in his village in Africa in order to bring electricity to his neighbors, another started a campaign to plant 1 million trees: to date, that project has planted 1 BILLION TREES! We also read about the Greenhouse Gas effect, and how energy is produced. Our coaches are pretty amazing at finding engaging reading materials for all of our K-6th grade scholar athletes. 

We've made it a year round habit at PAST&E to recycle and compost every day, but this month we were looking for more ways to reduce, reuse and recycle so we started a few projects! First off, we got seeds started for the PAST&E Garden, planting them in our single serving milk cartons that each student gets every day at PAST&E in their healthy snack. And to really get the garden going, we received Broccoli, Peas and Lettuce from Portland Nursery which we planted this weekend! The PAST&E Families are tending to the new starters and we hoping to plant them in a few weeks! To keep our planting schedule on track we've also received help from students at University of Portland and Oregon Health and Sciences University who've helped us prioritize our garden in the busy PAST&E schedule! Thank you to each of these groups for their help!

And finally, we saved up our paper and plastic recycled materials to use for a recycled art project with the theme: Imaginary Animals! And the results were some of the cutest animals we've seen!

Links:

• Visit our website!