By Submitted Content – June 17, 2010 Share
More graduates proceeded to the stage at the Mummers Museum, 1000 S. Second St., Friday morning. Decked in purple caps and gowns, these 28 youngsters aren’t headed to college just yet. Instead, they will begin elementary school next year. Preschoolers from Discovery Place Preschool, 2131 S. Seventh St., boasted their singing, dancing and spelling skill before receiving their diplomas. They even performed American Sign Language for Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” and the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Got a Feeling.”
But 19 of these youngsters are the first class to graduate from Fitadelphia Kids Obesity Prevention and Obesity Recovery Program — a pilot course that aims to teach the children healthy habits. Through the program the 4- and 5-year-olds learned 10 yoga poses through Yo! Stretch, about eight Pilates moves, three forms of dancing — salsa, merengue and reggaeton — through LaCardio as well as learning My Food Pyramid for Kids.
“These kids couldn’t even touch their toes when I started with them,” said Cindy Ortiz, Fitadelphia creator and director of the Northeast Philly-based La Placita Wellness and Education Center. “They’d say, ‘oh, it hurts.’”
Ortiz approached Butterflies teacher Alyssa McIntyre, who is also her yoga student, to implement the program at Discovery Place starting in September.
“I had a lot of children that had a hard time focusing or I have one child in particular that had jerky movements,” McIntyre said adding the program relaxed the children enabling them to pay attention to lessons better.
It even helped one student who was slightly overweight. Ortiz simply taught the child how to breathe from her abdomen. “She started to lose weight just by breathing correctly,” McIntyre said.
Ortiz launched La Placita four years ago after taking a $25,000 loan out on her house to start the nonprofit, which began to spread its wings this year after First Lady Michelle Obama launched her task force on childhood obesity, which La Placita has contributed to.
Discovery Place is the second pilot program Ortiz has done with the first being an eight-week program at Headstart, formerly at 13th and Jackson streets.
“The program does work,” Ortiz said. “Then they go home and complain [to their parents], ‘why are you feeding me junk?’ because they come to school and say, ‘my parents are feeding me junk.’”
The students at Discovery Place also discovered new foods. Each week Ortiz brought a food many of the children had never tried including dried kiwi, pistachios and almond milk.
Some of the foods were even new to the students’ parents. Martina Nash’s 5-year old daughter Kayla Williams introduced her to kiwi, which she had never tried before.
Her favorite thing she learned from the program was the yoga pose the mountain, Kayla, who will be a first-grader at A.S. Jenks next year, said as she stretched her arms over her head demonstrating the pose.
“[At home,] she’ll just be doing little, different exercises,” Nash, of Broad Street and Snyder Avenue, said.
Kayla also ensures the family eats healthier, Nash said.
“‘Mom, does this have a lot of calories? Does this have sugar?’ She’s skeptical of what she eats,” she said adding that on the flipside of most kids, Kayla has even requested to her to make vegetables more often. “It’s kind of awesome.”
Contact Staff Writer Amanda Snyder at asnyder@southphillyreview.com or ext. 117.
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Fitadelphia Kids program sparked the idea behind What’s Eating You Kid? In order to teach children we needed a manual and so after a lot of research What’s Eating You Kid? was born and completed in 2019. It was then copyrighted in 2021.