Author: Abree Knight
Time to Thrive: How to Improve Family Well-being This Summer
Summer is a big deal in the Northeast. The extra hours of daylight and warmth of the season are a welcome reprieve from our long, dark winters. It’s also a busy season as New Englanders scramble to take advantage of the good weather and it can be easy for family well-being to get lost in the shuffle of barbecues and beach days, especially if you’re also juggling school-age kids.
The key to optimizing well-being during the summer is finding a mix of play and routine that complements your lifestyle. Instead of trying to fit even more activities into an already packed schedule, we’ve put together some simple routines that you can adapt for your unique family situation.
Don’t Let a Chemical Choose Your Vibe: Teens Take the Lead During MPY Workshop
At Media Power Youth, we have the unique privilege of collaborating with young people who are just starting to find their voice. They are creative, funny, and smart. The students we encounter in our work inspire us to think differently about the challenges that surround us everyday and often jump at the chance to help peers step out of their comfort zone to learn a new skill, especially when that skill involves media.
We recently partnered with a group of community organizations on a vaping prevention initiative: Boys and Girls Club of Greater Derry, Community Alliance for Teen Safety (CATS), and South Central Public Health Network (SCPHN).
The Hidden Environmental Cost of “Free” Technology
By Varun Swamy, MPY Youth Advisory Board Member
I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw a post that stopped me. It claimed that a short conversation with an AI chatbot can use roughly the same amount of water as a standard water bottle: 500 milliliters.
4 Things You Can Try (Tonight!) If Your Phone Habits Are Ruining Your Sleep
By Roger Gelman, MPY Youth Advisory Board Member
Most of my friends wake up tired and cranky. Yes, our 7:20 AM school start time is a big reason. But so is the fact that we’re staying up way too late — and not only because of studying.
The Best Hack for Using Your Phone Less: Find a ‘Flow’ Activity
By Roger Gelman, MPY Youth Advisory Board Member
We’re always surrounded by our screens. We use our phones constantly for school, social life, and entertainment, which makes it hard to simply put them down. That’s why I think it’s important to have an activity that puts you into a flow state — a time when you are so focused that everything else doesn’t seem to matter. Especially being attached to your phone.
Understanding and Managing Emotions
By Casey Schmidl-Gagne, MPY Summer Media Camp Educator
Emotions are a tricky topic to talk about with kids. Positive, negative, and everything in between – emotions are a spectrum of feelings, mindsets, and physical reactions. Some of them are simpler to understand and manage, while some can feel incredibly difficult to even talk about. Let’s de-mystify the way emotions work, and work through some solutions that might help kids handle them.
6 Essential Tips for Navigating a ‘Bell-to-Bell’ Cell Phone Ban
By Roger Gelman, MPY Youth Advisory Board Member
We’d heard rumblings for a few months before the news was officially announced by our superintendent a few weeks before the school year began: our district would be implementing a “bell-to-bell” cell phone policy. Elementary students (K-4) must leave devices at home, middle schoolers (5-8) must store phones in lockers, and high school students (9-12) must keep them in their backpacks, off and silent.
My first reaction. Ugh. No phones at all? Even at lunch or in the hallways? It felt like a huge change and I was pretty skeptical about how it would go.
Building More Than Robots: How Engineering Taught Me to Lead
By Ayva Hanks, Media Power Youth Advisory Board Member
When I first joined my school’s robotics team, I thought leadership was about giving directions, making sure deadlines were met, and the robot actually worked when we pressed the start button. But somewhere between broken gearboxes, and endless redesigns, I realized leadership was something completely different. It wasn’t about being in charge. It was about building something, not just a robot, but a team.
7 Things I Learned From Being (Nearly) Phone-Free at Sleep-Away Camp
By Roger Gelman, Media Power Youth Advisory Board Member
Before the start of every summer my living room turns into Camp Packing Central: piles of T-shirts, bathing suits, and random socks everywhere. This was my seventh summer away, and while part of me was pumped to ditch my Google Classrooms and finals stress, I also had this weird feeling I couldn’t completely ignore. Not homesickness (sorry, Mom and Dad). It was more like “phone-mo” — the stress of giving up my phone for seven weeks. KEEP READING
Teacher Wish Lists: Bringing Community to the Classroom
by Abree Knight, MPY Board Member
Preparing for a new school year can be an incredibly busy time for public school educators. There’s events to plan, schedules to coordinate, and new students and parents to get to know, and, of course, a classroom to set up.
However, this last effort can be surprisingly expensive.