The Blanco Elementary School gymnasium was filled with lively dancing and vocals Friday afternoon as fourth graders performed a flamenco dance for parents and classmates to conclude a two‑week clinic that brought health and nutrition to students.
Leading up to the performance, instructors Marlee Cash and Jose Encinias worked with the students on the flamenco dance Tangos and taught nutrition lessons through hands‑on projects.
Cash and Encinias used hands‑on projects to educate students on nutrition, including comparing sugar content in beverages with physical sugar and inviting a local farmer to hold a cooking demonstration with tomatoes.
The second part of the clinic focused on physical exercise, with students warming up with jumping jacks, planks and situps before practicing their Tangos‑style dance.
The clinic was made possible through a New Mexico Department of Health grant that brought Cash and Encinias to Blanco for their first clinic. Cash said the focus was to bring flamenco to a school that would have less exposure to the style of dance.
For some students, flamenco was similar to other dance styles like line dancing, which made it easier to learn, Encinias said.
“They're super enthusiastic. They're into it,” Cash said. “They're asking us to quiz them on it. So it's really cool to see the impact it has on them over the course of just two weeks.”
In learning the dance, students learned how to communicate with their bodies through certain steps like the llamada, Encinias said.
“Because a lot of flamenco is like improvisation and communicating through sounds and dancing instead of words,” Cash said.
Students also gained self‑confidence and teamwork through the jaleo, a call‑out and encouragement used during flamenco.
“We told them, when your friend dances and you think they're doing a good job, you have to say it so that they feel confident,” Cash said.
Concluding the clinic, Encinias said the primary focus was to show students that being healthy does not need to be strict or regimented but can be fun through experimenting with foods and exercising by dance.
“For a first time out, this was really great. This group of kids is extraordinary,” Encinias said. “When you teach something kind of obscure, like flamenco, they may not be super into it at first, but by the end, it's very easy to get them hooked, and I think a lot of that just comes from the school itself, the community that you can feel they've built here already.”
At the final performance, students presented their projects to the audience before taking the stage to dance.
Patience Williams, Healthy Kids Healthy Communities coordinator with NMDOH, attended the performance and said the partnership with Blanco was successful and that the department is looking toward more programming in the future.
“I think mixing art and nutrition and different cultures all in one – it's been an amazing two weeks,” she said.
Lynda Spencer, superintendent, said Blanco was a great fit for a first‑time clinic based on the school’s demographics.
In the future, Spencer said she would like to expand the program to Naaba Ani Elementary School.
Students were hesitant at first until the hands‑on portion of the clinic, principal Darin Wright said.
“I think that hands on, is just as important as book work and I think this emphasizes that point of it to the kids, that learning doesn't always have to be book work, that it can be something else,” he said. “Our school is always looking for that new thing, and this was that new thing and I think it went really well.”
