Tiffany Keene beamed with pride as her daughter, Phoebe, 5, performed\u00a0in\u00a0a trio of figure skaters helping show parents filling the stands exactly what their\u00a0preschool\u00a0children have been up to the past\u00a032 weeks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Her daughter was partaking in an End of Year Celebration for a 32-week Learn to Skate program run as a partnership between the Refugee Women\u2019s Alliance (ReWA) and\u00a0One Roof\u00a0Foundation,\u00a0the\u00a0Kraken\u2019s\u00a0non-profit arm. This was the fifth cohort of classes to graduate from the program, which sees about 80 preschoolers\u00a0ages 5-and-under\u00a0bussed weekly to the Kraken Community\u00a0Iceplex\u00a0from\u00a0multiple\u00a0locations around the city for the free lessons.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And with five years of the program now complete, some parents, like\u00a0Keene\u00a0are starting to see multiple children graduate from their lessons.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMy son Rufus was with a previous cohort two years ago,\u201d Keene said. \u201cHe loves hockey. I remember a few years ago, we saw a demonstration being set up for ball hockey and he\u00a0tried it and turned to me\u00a0and said that he really wanted to learn how to skate and play hockey.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Enter\u00a0ReWA, which\u00a0provides free and low-cost, bilingual and bicultural childcare and preschool for children up to age 5\u00a0from low income, refugee and immigrant families, with learning centers on Martin Luther King Blvd. as well as in Lake City, Northgate,\u00a0Beacon Hill\u00a0and a new Othello location opened last month. Beacon Hill resident Keene, whose family\u00a0moved here 25\u00a0years ago from her native China, found that\u00a0ReWA\u00a0offered the Learn to Skate program and\u00a0immediately\u00a0enrolled her son.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, he learned how to skate and then he did hockey lessons as well,\u201d Keene said. \u201cAnd when Phoebe was 2, she was\u00a0actually in\u00a0the audience watching him perform. And then she said she wants to learn how to skate just like her brother.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Phoebe\u00a0first\u00a0took part in last year\u2019s fourth cohort of classes at age 4, then\u00a0returned this year.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cShe likes\u00a0the figure\u00a0skating because she\u2019s one of the\u00a0better\u00a0skaters,\u201d Keene said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
She was so good she got to\u00a0participate\u00a0in a hockey demonstration during the\u00a0End of Year Celebration, held in front of about 300 family and friends,\u00a0as well as the added special figure skating performance for only the trio of skaters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tiffany Keene beamed with pride as her daughter, Phoebe, 5, performed\u00a0in\u00a0a trio of figure skaters helping show parents…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":756985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-756984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/756985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}