Cheer up! Kids craft uplifting bracelets and cards for LI senior grads — and senior citizens

Even though Mia Yap is only 10, lately she’s had high school graduation on her mind.

“You do a lot of things when you’re graduating,” she explained. “You get to live your life, like you get a big, gigantic field trip and you get your prom and your party, you get freedom, you get a giant ceremony where your parents call out your name and you get to walk across a stage.”

But this year, the Class of 2020 won’t get to experience any of those milestones — at least not in person. So Mia and her sister, Lily, 8, decided to do something special for graduating seniors.

The girls’ mother, Leann Yap of Ronkonkoma, is a special education math teacher at Wyandanch Memorial High School. She said a lot of her students were sending her messages, saying how sad they were and that they missed school.

“My children wanted to help cheer them up a little bit, so we tried to come up with some ideas, and we had a lot of beads,” Yap said. “So we thought, bracelets!”

Mia and Lily have made 40 bracelets so far. Some of them are made by braiding string — they use the “jellyfish” method, where they cut a piece of cardboard into a circle, tie the string around it and continuously loop it around the circle to create a braid. 

The girls also use beads to make rainbow bracelets, and some with the Wyandanch colors: green, yellow and white. Yap then mails the creations to her students, which also include cards with well-wishes from her daughters.

Yap says she’s proud of her daughters, especially because of how much time they’ve put into this endeavor.

“I know they’re 8 and 10, but it does take them a lot of time to put them together; they definitely underestimated the amount of time,” she said with a laugh. “Those jellyfish bracelets take about two hours, and the bead ones will take them up to an hour.”

Yap held up a bracelet Lily had been working on — a few small, purple beads on a string. “You can see she's been working on this one since this morning.”

“Hey, I took a break!” Lily said.

“It takes time for their little fingers to put all the little beads on,” her mother added.

The girls agreed that they will continue making bracelets “until this is over.” In the meantime, they’ve been taking “social distancing walks” while wearing masks and doing plenty of homework. The reason their bracelets are important, they said in unison, “After rain, there’s always gonna be a rainbow.”

In Oceanside, 8-year-old Ava Pepe is echoing that sentiment. She’s been making cards, which she and her mother named “Kards of Kindness,” for another group of people who may be feeling lonely during the pandemic.

“All of these elderly people, they’re all over the country and they don't have family to go visit them right now,” she said. “So I was just thinking, why don't we cheer them up with cards?”

Ava draws things like smiley faces, sunshine and butterflies on the front of the card, and inside she writes messages such as: “You are always remembered” and “You are beautiful.” Her mother, Stephanie Pepe, drops them off at nursing homes around Long Island. 

The first delivery was in April, to the Beach Terrace Care Center in Long Beach, and Ava has also made cards for Oceanside Care Center, Pepe said. Ava and her mother also print out word searches and puzzles to include in the cards.

Pepe added that Ava will also send her "Kards of Kindness" through the national organization Kids For Peace. The nonprofit started a project called Loving Letters for Grandfriends, where children can send letters to elderly people who can no longer have visitors due to COVID-19.

Pepe said Ava has created about 170 cards as of mid-May.

“I really want to help them out so they won’t be lonely,” Ava said.

In addition to her written messages of hope, she has one more to give to seniors all over the country: “You’re not alone,” Ava said. “We’re in this together.”

By Rachel Weiss

rachel.weiss@newsday.com@RachMWeiss

Rachel Weiss joined Newsday in 2016. As a real estate/living multimedia reporter, Rachel writes feature stories and contributes to and appears in on-camera video packages. She was the lead reporter on Newsday’s LI Acts of Kindness series.