Katharine Mieszkowski

Children in the Summer Bridge program at Bahia Vista Elementary School doing a Zumba fitness workout.

Two exuberant Zumba fitness instructors -- “Who can touch the sky? Reach for the stars! Jump!” –- led the children in a jumping, spinning and twirling routine to a soundtrack of Latin rhythms ranging from salsa to Merengue.

While the young dancers, just four and five years old, could not always mimic their adult instructors' moves, most of them gave it their all, leaping and waving their arms, shimmying and twisting about.

With a little encouragement, some parents and caregivers even joined in, gamely shaking their booties. The children’s teachers and even some siblings moved and grooved, too. For the mostly Latino participants, instructions were given in both English and Spanish.

“Keep doing it. What you do, they will do,” Richard Waxman, president and founder of LIFT/Levántate, a non-profit which put on the fitness event, told the sweating parents as the fitness class wound down.

Every child who danced was awarded a prize – a child-sized jump rope.

The fitness dance party was part of Summer Bridge, a five-week kindergarten-readiness program for children who have never been to preschool and who will be starting elementary school this fall.

The goal of the morning of moving is for the kids to have a fun while exercising: “They get to learn early on that physical activity is fun, that it’s more fun than TV and videogames, and that it’s a community experience, meaning with their peers, their teachers and their parents,” said Waxman. 

Katharine Mieszkowski

Children and parents Zumba at the Summer Bridge program at Bahia Vista Elementary School

The dancing was followed by a bilingual puppet show on nutrition, after which the kids and their families made a “berry good banana split.” That’s a banana split that substitutes yogurt for ice cream, topped with berries and granola.

The fitness and nutrition lessons reflect a growing medical consensus that childhood obesity prevention must begin before kindergarten.

“Research has shown that the earlier we start, the better likelihood that we’ll have successes,” said Cio Hernandez, a commissioner with First Five of Marin, a program to promote the health of children in their first five years.

“When you look at the research, people who have a higher income live longer. So we want to make sure that all children have the same opportunity to health, regardless of income and where they live,” said Hernandez.

More than 20 percent of children between the ages of two and five are already overweight or obese, according to the Institute of Medicine. Childhood obesity disproportionately affects children from low-income and minority families.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children exercise at least an hour a day. Young children in daycare or preschools should be “vigorously physically active for at least 15 minutes per hour," the Institute recently recommended in a report, “Early Childhood Obesity Prevention Policies,” published in June.

In July, the British government went even further, arguing that even infants should exercise. It recommended that kids under age five who are old enough to walk should be physically active at least three hours a day, and that even infants who cannot yet walk should be placed on their stomachs or take swimming sessions with their parents.

Katharine Mieszkowski

Bahia Vista Elementary School in the Canal district in San Rafael, Marin.

During the Zumba workout in San Rafael, Monica Dennis danced along with her son Khemari, 5, who will soon start kindergarten and her daughter, Asi, 4. “When the kids see you as an adult moving around, they want to do the same,” she said. “It really does get the kids really moving instead of sitting in front of the TV all day.”

Dan Murphy, who danced “a little bit” of Zumba with his four-year-old daughter, Leah, said that the activity “fits right in with our normal routine. If we weren’t here, we would be at the park or something.”

This year, not all the children eligible for the Summer Bridge program were able to participate, according to Brenda Rivas, director of the program in the Canal District. She said that budget cuts forced the program had to turn away some local soon-to-be kindergarteners. 

But she hopes that the children who did take part in the program will be less likely to come to school this fall with cookies, soda and chips in their lunch bags. “We are just promoting good eating habits,” she said. “We give them ideas as to what to bring and what not to bring.”