Children on Saturday flocked to the Hill as part of the Leonard Carmichael Society's (LCS) annual festival for children. Just a day earlier, the Tufts Cooperative Peace Games program held its final event of the semester at Medford High School.
For Kids' Day, now in its 47th year, the Medford/Somerville campus transformed into a playground for children, with hotdogs and Oreos for lunch at Dewick-MacPhie Dining Center and carnival rides and arts and crafts stands in Gantcher Center.
Children aged five to seven were invited to join in a day of fun at Tufts planned by student volunteers, who led the participants around campus to take part in a variety of activities.
The day included performances put on by theater group Traveling Treasure Trunk, dance lessons at Jackson Gym and a pirate ship carnival ride.
A new objective for Kid's' Day this year was to be environmentally friendly, according to sophomore Sarah Soffer, one of the program coordinators.
"One of the big goals this year was for Kids' Day to go paperless, so we had the option of having paper registration packets but emphasized online registration," Soffer said. "The big goal of this year was going green and we hope to continue that in the future."
Freshman Alexis Donnaruma, one of the group leaders, felt the event was a great success.
"Kids' Day was a lot of fun, not only for the kids but also for me," Donnaruma said. "There were so many fun activities for the kids to do and at times I felt as though even I wanted to be a kid again. Not one kid was left disappointed."
Another group leader, freshman Amanda Puerto, noted some difficulties of supervising the children.
"There were those kids who just wouldn't listen to anything you said, which made it difficult walking from activity to activity," Puerto said.
She echoed Donnaruma, however, in saying she enjoyed herself spending the day with the children.
"Once at the activity, it was super easy to just have fun with [the children], because they loved everything so much," Puerto said.
Soffer agreed with the two group leaders that the event went well.
"The children seemed to have a great time, we talked to some of the children as they left and they seemed excited … which is our goal," Soffer said.
Meanwhile, the Tufts Cooperative Peace Games program, co-sponsored by LCS, the Peace and Justice Studies (PJS) Program and Zeta Psi, on Friday evening celebrated the end of a successful semester with an exhibition showcase.
Peace Games over the course of the semester sent Tufts volunteers into various Medford public elementary schools to lead third to fifth graders in a series of activities designed to teach students about negotiation and conflict resolution, according to sophomore Katie Greenman, a member of the PJS program.
At the event, 40 students and parents took part in various activities at the Medford High School gym to demonstrate cooperation and collaboration skills, Greenman said.
The purpose of the event was to provide students with the opportunity to share what they have learned, according to senior Coza Perry, an LCS co-coordinator.
"This is our attempt at a culminating event where all the kids from all the schools can come to show off their skills from the lessons to the parents," Perry said.
Tufts volunteers led the students through a series of activities designed to emphasize cooperation and problem solving skills. Children and their parents worked together to hop across a simulated toxic swamp and stack buckets using string, among other activities.
Peace Games started in 2006 in response to a call by Medford Public Schools District Superintendent Roy Belson for the community to aid in educating the "whole child."
"Schools are increasingly responsible for teaching students how to behave as citizens, and our schools need our help in doing that," Dale Bryan, PJS assistant director, said.
This semester alone, Peace Games worked with over 150 elementary school students in after school programs, according to Greenman.
Co-coordinator Maura Donahue, a senior, believes Peace Games' curriculum serves to fill a gap in general education.
"Peace is not part of the regular curriculum," Donahue said. "Kids spend so much time doing math problems and writing English papers that there's not a whole lot of dialogue about conflict resolution, and by the time you get to middle and high school, you get to issues of bullying. This is a good way to head that off and have kids act as mediators instead."
Parents like Lauren O'Keefe were excited about the effect of the program on their children.
"It has really helped his self-esteem, and he's gotten a lot better with communication," O'Keefe said of her son, Liam. "When he joined, he was uneasy about it, and by the end, he was like, ‘that was so much fun!'"
Belson has been impressed with the program so far.
"I think it's great," Belson told the Daily. "Schools are becoming more and more responsible for educating not just the academic child, but the social and emotional child. It's important that students learn that their success is not just about individual success but also the ability to network and cooperate."
Saumya Vaishampayan contributed reporting to this article.
