Moms as Mentors and an Olympic Gold Medalist Visit Belmont Day School
The day began with community building where moms and daughters ran all over the gym searching for commonalities, such as the number of siblings in their families, the towns they were born in, even the color of their toothbrushes. From there, moms and daughters split into five groups, broken up by age, and they attended rotation sessions ranging from problem solving challenges to active games. In some sessions moms and daughters worked together to figure out how to get everyone from one side of the “spider web” to the other. In other sessions, moms and daughters worked as partners to properly learn how to throw a ball or to shoot a basket, basic skills which many girls and women don’t know how to do. Some sessions even took moms and girls outside on a hike to trigger their creative juices when building fairy houses in the woods.
A highlight of the day was the two guest speakers, who engaged the girls and moms before and after lunch with their presentations. The first speaker was nutritionist Peg Doyle of www.wellnessandyou.com, who opened all of our eyes to the sneaky ways food companies “hide” sugar in many ingredients. Our featured speaker for the day was Olympic Gold and Silver Medalist, AJ Mleczko Griswold of Concord, who wowed the room with her life experiences and her silver and gold medal stories. The girls were especially inspired by AJ, learning about how she faced disappointment and chose to move forward, and they all took away the value of hard work. Getting to the Olympics is not an easy task, but it can be done.
This special day ended with moms and daughters making bead bracelets, moms for daughters and daughters for moms. Each bead on the bracelet was to be placed with some thought, representing what they had learned about the day, how they felt about each other, and what to remember going forward.
Many members of the Belmont Day School community helped to get this first Boston program off the ground. We are grateful to Belmont Day for hosting this successful event! Belmont Day School is a coed pre-k through eighth grade independent day school serving various communities in and around Boston. To learn more about Belmont Day School, please visit www.belmontday.org.