Dancercise Blog

Tessa is back at Mall Of America next week for some fun on St. Patrick’s Day.  Of course, everyone is Irish on March 17th, and Tessa is no exception.  We’ll be looking for Lucky Leprechaun, and we’ll also have a Treasure Hunt sweepstakes where you can have the chance to win some great prizes with just a little detective work. Tuesday March 17th at the Best Buy Rotunda at Mall Of America, 10:30am and 11:30am.

Then Tessa will be at Minnesota Children’s Museum on Sunday March 22nd.  You have to pay to get in if you’re not a member, but MCM is a great place to spend a day with a young family with lots of activities to keep busy minds well, busy, and a concert fromTessa too.  Hope to see you there!  Check out our other live dates here www.dancercise.com/live

It’s a bit dated relatively speaking, but I came across this report from the National Poll on Children’s Health at the University of Michigan, in which they established that obesity is the #1 concern of parents.  Now, that might have varied up and down over the months since this particular report was published, but I expect it to continue to rank highly.  In the current economic climate, many families are cutting back on extra-curricular activities for kids to save money.  In addition, as we all know, physical education along with the arts and music are usually among the first casualties when the schools have to cut back (and you know it’s coming).  Finally, with more and more families being affected by layoffs, more are choosing to stay at home with younger children rather than struggle to find the second income that barely covers the cost of childcare.  And those families have more and more to do to just stay on top of their lives and manage budgets, and it’s harder to find the time to get out and stay active with kids, especially in our northern states where the climate often makes things a little more challenging this time of year.  Anyway, I thought this was an interesting report.  We’ve heard all of the medical journals talking about this “epidemic” and its consequences (many of which, such as higher rates of type 2 diabetes in kids are only now beginning to really show), so it was interesting to see it reinforced by data collected directly from parents.  Here’s the link to the report.

Tessa will be back out at the malls and other locations in March.  On St. Patrick’s day, March 17th, we will be back at the Mall Of America, but this time in the Best Buy Rotunda.  We’ll have a hunt for Lucky Leprechaun, and a treasure hunt with some of our friends at stores in the mall.

Then on Sunday March 22nd, we’ll be at the Minnesota Children’s Museum providing a concert for guests of the museum which, if you haven’t been, is a great way to spend a Sunday with your family.

We hope to see you out and about in March.  Spring is not far away!

We’re running a little behind here, it’s been a busy couple of weeks, but hopefully you caught Dancercise on this article on KARE11.  This was a completely opportunistic news item.  A KARE11 photographer that knows of us, suggested that our Friday Feb 13th fun club would make an interesting anchor for a story about Valentine’s day activity, and so there we were at 5:30pm welcoming kids and parents for drop-off, and George and Julianna from KARE11 show up to do a story.  Anyway, it was great fun, and it was nice to make the 10pm news!