(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to The Journal, I'm Steve Kendall.

Out-of-school learning is important to any child's education.

Later on in the program, we're gonna be joined by two people from the Wood County Educational Service Center, Lexie Stelnicki and Hanna Feffer.

But right now we're joined by WBGU-PBS's Outreach Director for Education, Kelly Pheneger.

So Kelly, thanks for agreeing to do the show.

- Absolutely.

- Out-of-school learning, obviously, one of the things that we do among the many things we do for educational outreach is Ohio Learns 360.

So let's start there, but talk about that a little bit and then maybe we can talk about some of the other things we do in terms of reaching out to children for education outside the classroom.

- Absolutely.

Not everybody knows that our public television station has an education and outreach branch what we indeed do, and I work with my colleague, Laural Kirchner, to deliver education and outreach to all of Northwest Ohio and West Central Ohio.

And the Ohio Learns 360 program is what I'd really like to spend some time talking to you about today, and that's our program that's funded by the Ohio Department of Education.

The funding is going to all eight public television stations in the state of Ohio, including WBGU.

Of course, we're affiliated with Bowling Green State University, but we reach all of you viewers out there in the Northwest Ohio area.

And the purpose of Ohio Learn 360 is to enrich out-of-school-time learning experiences, so we're gonna do that in several different ways through this program.

One way is we're reaching out to families and parents that have children in grades K through 5 to give them some support and advice and some tips about how to help their children learn outside of school and also how to support their children when they're in school.

So one thing that you can look for right now is if you go to the wbgu.org website, go under the Education title in our menu.

So go over to our menu, check out Education, and you will see Ohio Learns 360, tap on or click on that page, and that will take you to a link that says Family Webinars.

And when you go watch the Family Webinars, I believe there's eight that are already, they have been recorded already and you can view them anytime.

I watched one over the weekend while I was folding laundry.

(Steve chuckles) Yeah, and it was about helping my child with learning loss.

Like, what can I do to help my child, if they might be maybe behind a little bit in learning, how do I recognize that and then how do I support them?

So some real easy tips on how to communicate with the school and the teachers, and also some things that we can do at home.

So we have those webinars.

They cover topics like helping your child deal with stressful situations because even though they're kids, they deal with stress too.

[Steve] Sure.

- You know, there's a lot of things changing around them and kids can get anxious and stressed out.

So what can you do to help them?

So we have webinars on that.

Helping children develop friendships, which is really important.

Kids missed out on a lot of those opportunities during the pandemic time.

So not only are we helping families with resources on science, technology, engineering and math and literacy skills, but we also wanna help them support their child's social and emotional development too.

So we've got that.

- And you make a good point about the fact that even under normal circumstances, summer can be a time where there's a little bit of regression because kids are away from school.

But with the pandemic, obviously, it's even more important now to have these kind of resources available because we know that there was some loss in terms of students keeping current with where progression normally would've been.

So it's even more important now to have these kind of resources.

- Absolutely.

And I think some of the research that was just a year out from the pandemic, the numbers are a bit better now, But across Ohio, on average, there was, our students were testing about a year behind in math, and it's just because they missed out on those learning opportunities.

And now they're back in school, they're getting those opportunities.

And there are programs like Ohio Learns 360 and other wonderful afterschool and out-of-school-time learning programs that are helping them to have more of those learning opportunities.

And that's gonna help bridge that gap.

- Age wise, what's the target group in terms of Ohio Learns 360 and some of these other programs?

- So the Ohio Learns 360 program, specifically we're targeting that K through 5 grade.

But there are programs all throughout Ohio to help students K through 12.

In fact, there is a relatively new program called the Ohio ACE, and that stands for Afterschool Child Enrichment program.

So there's a savings program that's available.

If you do an internet search of an Ohio, capital A-capital C-capital E, Ohio ACE, you'll be able to see if your family qualifies for funds.

You can get up to, I believe the number right now is $1,000 in a savings account that you can spend as a family on out-of-school time learning experiences.

It could include a program like the Community Learning Centers of Wood County Educational Service Center.

The women that are gonna be on after me today are gonna talk about their program.

Their program qualifies.

You can use those funds on a program like theirs.

You can use the funds on music lessons, art lessons, field trips.

If you wanna learn more about it, just go online to the Ohio ACE to see if you qualify.

Most people will qualify.

A family of four that makes up to, I think, about $130,000 a year can qualify for funds, and I think those funds are available until they're exhausted.

So better to go there now and see if you can take advantage of that.

And then, there's also a marketplace where you can search for programs that you can enroll your child in.

- Now obviously, we've talked about those specifics.

Are there other things that we do as a TV station that we reach out to the community in this area?

- Yeah, definitely.

I will talk about our community events that we have, but I also wanna make sure that I have time to talk about our Camp-in-a-Box resources because that is a part of Ohio Learns 360.

But we have community events.

And in fact, just over the last weekend, we were at the Lilac Festival in Defiance, Ohio.

And we sometimes go to other people's community events.

So this one, I believe, was run by the Defiance Convention and Visitors' Bureau.

So we attended and we had a table.

We passed out books to families because we know it's important for families to read together at home.

We talked to them about our free learning apps from PBS Kids, so check those apps out.

Tons of free PBS Kids learning apps that you can watch WBGU online.

We've got a live stream.

So whether you're watching us live, you know, on The Journal or you can pick us up, we have a lot of recorded programs too, so you can watch anytime.

So there's a lot of great things there.

And then at those events we bring out our mascot, Ruby the Red-Eyed Tree Frog, because that's kind of a fun element for us.

We provide an educational learning opportunity, and then we tell families about programs like Ohio Learns 360, those webinars, and those enrichment programs that we have available.

- Yeah.

So we've got a couple of minutes, tell us about Camp-in-a-Box because that's an interesting name.

[Kelly] Definitely.

[Steve] What is that?

- Okay, so I believe we'll have some visuals on this.

The Camp-in-a-Box is a box that's about this big, and it has everything an out-of-school time provider will need to have a week-long camp.

When I say camp, I mean about an hour of an educational activity per day.

So we have five activities in each box.

All are related to a theme, sometimes related to a PBS theme.

We provide a facilitator's guide, we provide activity materials.

So for instance, one of our boxes that we have is about aviation.

And that afterschool provider can take that box and they can build airplanes with their students, they can learn about the engineering process, they can learn about flight, how wind affects a plane, they can learn about careers in aviation.

So there's a lot of learning packed into these boxes.

And our other guests that we have on today, they are taking full advantage of these boxes and they're gonna be talking more about how they're integrating these boxes into their learning.

And that's something we're just really proud to help them with, is just to help empower them to be able to provide additional resources so that they can spend more time with these students engaged in these learning experiences and make it fun too.

Because a lot of kids know our PBS Kids characters and they're delighted to watch a segment from DragonflyTV or SciGirls or Wild Kratts, for example, and that can get them excited about maybe making something, exploring, learning together.

And I just want to say that probably for the families that are watching, the best thing that you can do for kids to help them with learning is just to be curious and excited about learning yourself.

Show them that you love learning, and then get them involved in some of these great enrichment programs like the Community Learning Centers of Wood County Educational Service Center.

[Steve] Okay, great.

- Yeah.

- So yeah, we'll be talking with them in a moment.

So thank you so much for coming on and giving us all this information about the educational opportunities available for Ohio families.

- Absolutely, and I just wanna leave it with, go to wbgu.org and check out our Education section because we have so many more resources.

Thanks, Steve.

- Yeah, thanks, Kelly.

Back in just a moment here on The Journal, we're talking with two representatives from the Wood County Educational Service Center.

Back in just a moment.

Thank you for staying with us around The Journal.

We're talking about out-of-school learning for students.

And in our previous segment, we talked with the representative of WBGU-PBS, Kelly Pheneger.

We're joined in this segment by Hanna Feffer and Lexie Stelnicki.

Thank you both for being here.

[Hanna] Thanks for having us.

- From the Wood County Educational Service Center.

Hanna, first of all, tell us Wood County Educational Service Center, what is that?

Because people probably hear the name a lot, maybe they know what you guys do, maybe they don't.

So kind of give us a quick overview of what you do overall and then we can dig deeper into some of the specific things that you folks are involved in.

- Okay, yeah.

[Hanna] Okay, so the Wood County Educational Service Center is a building that provides services to many local school districts within Wood County.

And so, our districts, you know, if they cannot figure out a way to serve their students within, or sometimes we have special aspects or programs that they aren't able to put together because they're so busy doing so many things for their students within their districts, and so our districts, we offer what we say is almost like a little menu for them and we offer services.

And so, the Community Learning Centers is a before or after school summer program that districts can reach out and ask if they want us to come out.

And so, we're grant funded by the Ohio Department of Education.

And so, we write grants and if we get a grant and so lucky to be, then we go out and we provide services to those districts.

So we are here to provide those things to the districts.

- Now, Lexie, what are some of the things that you do, and I know we talked about Camp-in-a-Box and we'll get back to that, but what are some of the other things that you guys do besides Camp-in-a-Box?

Because we'll spend some time on that in a moment, but go ahead, yeah.

- Absolutely.

So during the school year, we do a lot of afterschool enrichment.

So we do math and reading enrichment through what we call SuccessMaker, which is an online program.

We do Discovery Zones, which is our curriculum that focuses on a whole bunch of plethora of topics and allows students to do hands-on learning.

We do a whole bunch of different activities for the kids to let them explore and let them learn.

During the summer, we're gonna go on a enrichment trips, we're gonna have Maumee Bay State Park come out to our sites, we're gonna go to Imagination Station, the zoo, all of those different things.

And so, we're really giving kids an experience, A, to bridge the gap during the times that they're not in school, but also some experiences that they may not get otherwise.

So we're really excited to be able to provide these services to the students and the curriculum to them that they can grow from.

[Steve] Yeah, well and it's interesting 'cause it keeps them engaged but it's done in a way, it seems to me being a layman in this, that it's fun for them to do it.

It's not like, "Oh, now we get to go to summer school."

[Lexie] Yes, that's right.

[Steve] Not that there's anything wrong with that, but this gives them a chance to sort of learn.

And yet in a way, they probably don't even know their, it's a school thing, right?

[Hanna] That's right.

That's right.

And we always say that if we can disguise learning as fun, then we're doing it right.

So, yeah.

And I want to kind of elaborate a little bit about, you know, our curriculum because it is difficult.

During the summer, we're open from 6:30 AM to 6:00 PM, so we have our students for 11-and-a-half hours a day, K to 5.

So even our teachers, you know, they have them throughout the day, six hours a day, and then they go to the next teacher the next year.

And for us, sometimes we have our students for six years in a row.

And so, we're really making an impact on them.

So for us to keep it interesting and them on their toes and excited to learn can be somewhat, you know, a little bit difficult.

- Well, and you know, you talk about the number of hours, it's tough to keep anybody engaged for those number of hours and anything.

So I think if you can do that, it's really cool.

- [Hanna] Yes, yes.

- [Lexie] And we're doing it at such high numbers too.

- [Hanna] Yes.

- Right now, we have about 200 kids enrolled in our morning program, about 300 enrolled in our PM program, and for the summer, right now we have about 320 expected to join us, and that number keeps growing as well.

So we're trying to do learning at a high level and a fun level for the kids.

- Now, how do they get to the locations?

They're on their own?

Do they drive?

- Sure.

Yup, yup, yup.

With parents, it's a pick-up, drop off location for each of our districts.

And so, the four districts that we're in this summer will be Bowling Green, North Baltimore, Rossford, and Northwood.

Those are our four locations this summer.

- Yeah, because you mentioned the whole county and then obviously, it's a good point too because, as you said, school systems have a lot of responsibilities, and so to take on this may or may not be, well, resource-wise for them to do it.

Plus you're talking and developing a whole curriculum here, which is, as we know, is a whole, that's a big load to take on to begin with.

Now, as you said, you have a lot of repeat students over the years.

I know you talked about K through 5, you're probably seeing them year after year in a lot of cases.

- [Lexie] Yeah, absolutely.

- When you're done at the end of these sessions, do you get response from the parents or the school districts on how things went and whether they liked what happened or they have suggestions, maybe things like that?

[Lexie] Yeah, so we actually are pretty data-driven.

And so, we hand out surveys once a semester.

- Once a semester, yeah.

- To teachers, parents, students, and get their feedback on how they enjoy the program, what's beneficial to the students, what's not beneficial.

And so then, we always are taking that feedback and we are improving our program based on it.

- Yeah, now, obviously, you try to integrate and supplement, how do you assess what you should make available versus things that... Well, this isn't an area that we need to get into versus this is one that really needs a lot of attention.

How do you come to that conclusion?

- Well, first and foremost, you know, the Ohio Department of Education says X, Y, Z, right?

So we make sure that we do those things.

Absolutely.

And then secondarily, we go and we meet with the teachers.

You know, we meet with them about their individual students, about their grades, and we say, "What do they need right now?

Is it homework-based?

Do they need that quiet reading time?

Do we need to bring in volunteers to work with them one-on-one?"

So we really try to, in each individual district and each individual teacher, talk to them and see how we can serve the students best.

So we do try to communicate and network as much as we can.

- Yeah, so- - [Lexie] And so not- I'm sorry.

[Steve] No, go ahead.

Go ahead.

- No, and so not only with the teachers as a whole, we also work with the teachers as individual levels.

So if we have students who we know may need that extra help in math or reading or things like that, we're working with the teacher one-on-one to try and make it beneficial for that student as well.

- Yeah, because that's a good thing 'cause you were able to then customize and target what each student and/or district needs to fulfill a need that they have.

That's really good because, you know, a lot of times you'll hear programs that are like, well here's what you get one, size fits all.

And it may be something that one district has, they're already doing that, or there's something that they really need done but it doesn't fit in that criteria.

So it's good to know that these kind of programs kind of fill in the gaps and sort of supplement and compliment what's going on in the districts as well.

One of the things, and I guess for people that, how do they find out about this?

How would I get involved if I'm a parent or a school district?

They contact you guys.

Is there a simple way for them to do that?

- Sure, absolutely.

First, they can just call the Wood County Educational Service Center and ask for the Community Learning Centers, and we would direct them right to our website.

Or go to our website and the applications are right there, so they can go on and fill it out for their student, and then we'll process it through our Registration Department.

And for us, you know, we're looking to not cap any of our locations.

We're gonna keep looking for the staff right now.

And so, lucky for us, BGSU is right here and they have an Education Department.

So we give opportunities to young professionals so they can come out and work directly with the students.

- Well, that was gonna be a question because we know that in terms of, and we just got a moment or two in this segment, getting people to be available, finding this because we know that there's a teacher shortage.

That's been a thing.

So the good news is you're able to find people to do these kind of things.

So good, good.

[Lexie] Yes, yes.

- Yeah, good.

When we come back, we'll we'll start with Camp-in-a-Box and go from there because I know I gotta find out more about this, because I know Kelly's been talking to us about the sheer volume of things and the range of things that are available in that.

So back in just a moment with the representatives from Wood County Educational Service Center, Hanna Feffer and Lexie Stelnicki here on The Journal.

Back in just a moment.

Thank you for staying with here on The Journal, we're joined again by Kelly Pheneger from WBGU-PBS and our guests from the Wood County Educational Service Center, Hanna Feffer and Lexie Stelnicki.

Hanna, we touched on a lot of the things you do there as far as curriculum, but there's obviously a lot more.

So tell us more about the curriculum at the Wood County ESC.

- Well, first of all, Lexie is our curriculum guru.

So we are so lucky to have her.

I wanna say, you know, right before COVID, we were talking about how do we get an afterschool curriculum that hits all of the needs, and the Camp-in-a-Box is an amazing opportunity for us to take advantage of, which we're gonna talk about here in a second.

But the other aspect that we had is our previous director, Susan Spencer, and Lexie got together and determined that maybe we needed to create our own curriculum.

So our curriculum that we utilize at the Community Learning Centers is called Discovery Zones, and within this curriculum, we talk about social emotional learning, we have circle time built into it.

It keeps our schedule for our many sites with 10 locations, they're able to stay on topic together.

And so, we have themes of the week.

So we might have superhero week or we might have science week, or whatever it might be.

[Lexie] Last week, was rollercoaster.

- Rollercoaster.

So they got to build roller coasters and they got to watch videos about roller coasters.

So for us, we try to create a curriculum that hits all of our needs for our grants, for our students to keep them interactive.

And we use Google Classroom for that, and Lexie builds it, so if you can talk a little bit about that.

- So with that, we build in our Discovery Zones.

So all of them are Google-based.

We have the circle time built in, we have activities built in, we have reading activities where they write on prompt, they have matching and Google Earth built into it.

They have an exploratory activity where they are researching a different topic for roller coasters, they are researching their favorite rollercoaster, or just anything, yeah, like, how to build a rollercoaster.

And then they were building the rollercoaster out of pulled noodles and marbles to create the hands-on effect for the STEM.

And so, every week is built in like that.

And then, we also built in social emotional components to it as well.

So we, during COVID times, we created a curriculum called Foundations and we opened it up to anyone in Ohio basically who would like to do it, and they talk on different topics such as confidence and perseverance and things like that.

And we do it in a fun way where Susan, as she mentioned before, does a little video, but then we also have books on it in math and crafts and we work on that.

And then recently, we just got into a SPOT, which I don't know if you're familiar with SPOT at all.

It is this amazing social emotional curriculum that a woman named Diane created.

And they're these little spot characters, literally spots, and they all have books and feelings associated with them.

And so, the kids really have the hands-on again and then the book to back it up so they're learning about different emotions.

And so, they don't even know that they're learning about it because they have the little spot characters and they're playing and doing the different things that are in the book, but it's really a cool curriculum.

And so, all of these things together help us to fill our days and help out the kids to feel like they're having fun at our program and learning, and well maybe they don't even know that they're learning.

- [Hanna] That's right.

- Yes.

- Well, and you know, it's interesting you touch on the social emotional because we know that a large part of of learning is that socialization, being around other kids, other people.

So it's interesting you touch on that.

And the other thing I've picked up on, it's really obvious that this allows the children to be creative.

It's not like, "Oh, here's the five things you're supposed to do today."

[Lexie] Yeah.

- There may be five things, but they can construct within those five elements their idea of what doing that particular aspect is as opposed to, you know, answer these five questions.

- [Hanna] That's right, yeah.

- They create sort of their own educational learning experience, which is really kind of cool.

- We try to make sure that it's open-ended so that they have the activity that we're doing, but then they can discover it on their own or do whatever they want, yeah.

[Steve] Wow, wow.

Now I know we, and I think we've got a few minutes yet, Camp-in-a-Box, which we talked about.

And again, that sounds like really an interesting package because it touches on all these kind of things that we've just talked about.

So a little more on Camp-in-a-Box.

Let's go there.

- So I just wanna say that, you know, we're so lucky to have all of our community partners, and when they say that it takes a village to build a student, they're not kidding.

And having them 11-and-a-half hours a day, this Camp-in-a-Box is exactly what we need to be able to build a student.

So we're so thankful for these resources and this partnership.

So I'll let you guys talk a little bit about Camp-in-a-Box.

[Lexie] Yeah, so this summer, we're doing a couple different Camp-in-a-Box.

We are doing the Wild Kratts Animal Camp-in-a-Box and we're doing Design Studio Camp-in-a-Box.

And it really allows, what I like about Camp-in-a-Box is, A, you came out and you talked to us and really taught us how to facilitate it, which is very, very helpful, and then secondly, it allows all of our learners to learn in different ways.

So it's not just hands-on, it's not just writing, it's not just those type of things.

It's, we're gonna do a Venn diagram, we're gonna do a hands-on activity, we're gonna do all of these things to learn about animals.

And then you have your Wild Kratts characters that the kids love and enjoy helping them with it as well.

So that's what I really enjoy about Camp-in-a-Box.

- Now, Kelly, how did Camp-in-a-Box come about?

I mean, how did you discover it or how did that push out toward us?

- Well, I think that out-of-school-time providers like your program have always enjoyed using PBS learning materials, PBS Kids learning materials to help kids get excited about learning.

You know, even back when I was growing up, I loved it when we watched Reading Rainbow in our classroom.

That inspired me to wanna read.

And I think our educational programming still does that.

So you might watch a video clip that's just a couple minutes long about, you know, the Wild Kratts and them learning about animals, and that can inspire kids to want to learn more about that topic.

So I think it's a good springboard for learning.

And I think as a state, we recognized that as a state group of Ohio public television stations that our resources have been used as valuable learning tools.

And let's help build a curriculum that can, well, some programming that can support a curriculum that you can use everything you need in the boxes right there.

There's enough materials in each box for 20 children to learn.

There's lesson plans that have been developed that are tied to out-of-school time learning standards, which helps you because then you already know.

We cover topics like, for instance, you talked about the Venn diagram.

So we're learning about Wild Kratts and animals, which is really exciting, but they're also learning about informational literacy.

[Steve] Yes.

- And know how to learn, how to read a book, a non-fiction book, what's a glossary, what's a table of contents, all of these things.

And then, that's gonna help those kids when they go back to school too, and it's just gonna help them to be life-long learners.

And that's what we try to do as a television station, and I think that's what you're doing too.

You talked about open-ended activities.

We wanna teach kids to get excited about learning, be problem-solvers so that they're gonna wanna continue learning when they're with you and then beyond.

[Lexie] One of the guests we have this summer, I'm sorry, is the library, and I can just see our kids using the Camp-in-a-Box learning about Tortuga.

[Kelly] Yeah.

[Hanna] Yeah.

[Lexie] Turtles.

[Kelly] Yeah.

[Lexie] And then, going to the library when they come to us and checking out books about the Tortuga Turtles or checking out books about similar animals.

So that we're creating those partnerships even out of those boxes, so that's really cool.

[Kelly] Absolutely.

- We're gonna have to leave it there, but it sounds like a lot of things.

And obviously, you can check out the website for the Wood County ESC and our website at WBGU or BGSU, excuse me, wbgu.org, and find out all this information.

So Hanna Feffer, Lexie Stelnicki, Kelly Pheneger, thanks for coming on.

We'll talk again soon, and never hesitate to come on to talk about this because obviously, education's what we do and we appreciate you guys, what you do and taking time to talk with us today about it.

So thank you.

- Thank you.

- You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night on WBGU-PBS.

We will see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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