Rhymes on Rhymes Place

close up of an original poem by Hannah

the recycled billboard waiting to be unveiled

more rhymes-- some familiar and some new

Art smart parents prepare bubbles for the celebration.

The last week of April hosted another successful year of Rhymes on Rhymes Place. Casey Elementary's carpool line is on a street named Rhymes Place. When her daughter was a first grade student at Casey, Thea Faulkner had a light-bulb moment while waiting to pick up her daughter in the Rhymes Place line. After talking and brainstorming with other parents, Rhymes on Rhymes Place was begun. This year's event is the third annual celebration of poetry and rhyming. It is a sustainable and special project coordinated by art smart parents who know that supporting teachers and students in creative ways helps everyone learn more and have fun in the process!

This year's parents assisted and led events all week long with an interactive and arts-integrated visit from Mother Goose (Julie Owen) and a visit from Monique McMillon who assists children in making special hats that correlate to poetry. Parents help children make pop-up books for their rhymes, they supervise writing rhymes on the sidewalk with chalk, and they facilitate copying rhymes onto a recycled billboard that becomes the Rhymes Place banner.

On the final day of the week-long focus on rhymes and poetry, all first grade students help to unveil their collective masterpiece on Rhymes Place. Parents provide bubbles and popsicles to help the children celebrate their hard work and creativity. Below is a short video of the unveiling!



If you are a first grade parent, I would love to hear about your thoughts and experiences of this special event. What did your child or children learn about rhyming and poetry? Did they have good stories to tell about the Rhymes on Rhymes Place week? Having participated in the event for three years, I believe it improves each year from everyone's ideas and collective wisdom.

Casey Arts Alive!

Last Saturday, families, teachers, and volunteers from the community spent time creating together and celebrating Casey Elementary. Over 40 people-- parents, staff, and community members-- gave time or resources to make this event happen. Thank you so much! Over 120 people attended the festival. The visual art contest had 25 entries. The Poetry Out Loud Celebration had over 15 entries-- including some last minute interest. The Art Smart Committee hopes that Casey Arts Alive will become an annual event and that each year's group of art smart parents will feel free to create the festival in new and exciting ways.

Below are slide shows from the day's events:

Dancing Together with instructor Sonita Singh



Visual Art Contest with judges Rachel Misenar, Roz Roy, and Limeul Eubanks and coordinated by Stephanie Ivy

Knitting Together with instructors Bonnie Bowley, Jennifer Deaton, Susan Nix, Donna Evans, and Kathy Devenney

Drawing Together with instructors Adrien Caroll-Perkins and Shannon Frost



Gardening Together with instructors Melanie Allen, Mrs. Morgan, and Robby Luckett

Music Together with Strings Instructor Tammy Luke and strings students

Transformation

Transformation

We searched for tiny, white worlds,
eggs on milkweed,
like Horton and his speck of dust.

Now, we are observing
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
who must eat
and grow,
eat
and
grow.

Watching children
watch their caterpillars
and care for them
creates a chrysalis
for us to share.

Our wonder spins the silk button that
anchors our retreat and reflection.

We become more.
We are monarchs.

We emerge
together,
daily,
to fly on wings of
books, drawings, dances,
paintings, poems, stories,
questions, songs, gardens,
and dreams.

Over the weekend, one of the monarch butterflies that my family and I have been raising emerged from her chrysalis. We did this project with several other Casey families after we rescued the eggs and harvested milkweed during a special Monarch Butterfly Rescue program of the Clinton Community Nature Center. I highly recommend this annual event to all families!

I wrote "Transformation" during the process of raising "Matilda" (in photos above) from an egg to a butterfly with my children and sharing her with groups of students at various schools. I had intended to read the poem for the Poetry Out Loud portion of our Casey Family Arts Festival on Saturday, May 2, but I couldn't find my poem when it was my turn.

I also wrote this poem while writing an essay about arts integrated education for Anne Foster's Education Blog for change.org. I do not claim to be a poet. However, I love reading poetry, and I like how the process of writing a poem distills my thoughts to what is essential. Both the field study/scientific experience of raising the monarch butterflies and the creative process of crafting my poem informed the writing of the essay. Likewise, drafting the essay informed the development of the poem. Finally, a little bit of my background as a children’s librarian found it’s way into the poem, too.

Casey Elementary and its emphasis on arts integration has transformed my children's lives and my life as a parent (and librarian), too.

photos of "Matilda the Monarch" taken by Julie Owen on May 3, 2009

Rhymes, Garden, Art, and Family Fun!

So much is happening in the Casey community this week that it is difficult to keep up with everything! Hopefully, I can pique your curiosity with these collages and short descriptions of each event. During the next two weeks, I will follow up with individual posts for each project. Art smart parents have been very busy!

First grade parents successfully implemented the third annual Rhymes on Rhymes Place complete with pop-up book making, poetry reading, arts integrated rhyming activities, banner making, and more.

The garden is growing, and will be featured as one of the main activities at our Casey Family Arts Festival on Saturday, May 2, from 1-4 pm. Stay tuned for a special announcement regarding Mississippi Public Broadcasting and our garden project!

Casey's JumpstART project is on display along with other projects from Ask4More Arts schools in the district at the Mississippi Arts Center now through May 17. The Arts Center is open Monday - Saturday, 10 am - 6 pm and Sunday, 1 pm - 5 pm. The exhibit opening is Saturday, May 2, 2009, from 10 am - 2 pm. You don't want to miss this amazing exhibit of student work with artists and teachers from 21 elementary schools in Jackson Public Schools.

In the collage above, judges score art entries in the visual art contest for the first ever Casey Family Arts Festival on Saturday, May 2, from 1-4 pm. Hands-on activities will be offered from 1-3 pm. Poetry Out Loud is from 3 to 4 pm. Come join us as we celebrate "Casey Arts Alive: A Celebration of Creating Together!" The visual art entries are on display. Hands-on activities are Gardening Together, Knitting Together, Dancing Together, and Drawing Together. This event is offered by Casey families for the Casey community.

Learning Styles and Arts Integration

In the photos above, Mr. Howell discusses the instant bar charts that were created from inventory results of workshop participants using different colored sticky notes.

On Tuesday, April 7th, John Howell and Ann Jones from Casey Elementary, Susan Womack of Parents for Public Schools of Greater Jackson, and I as a graduate of the Parent Leadership Institute facilitated a workshop for district Ask4MoreArts teachers about Learning Styles and Arts Integration. Two sessions were offered-- one for lower elementary teachers and one for upper elementary teachers. The workshop used arts integration techniques to explore learning styles. Teachers who attended the workshop may, in turn, share this information, lessons, and techniques with colleagues, students, and parents in their schools.

The learning styles workshop is based upon a session in the curriculum for the Parent Leadership Institute. After completing the Institute in 2007, I co-facilitated a workshop for parents at Casey and at Oak Forest Elementary with Venetia Miller, another PLI graduate and Oak Forest parent. We thought this information was extremely relevant to our children's elementary schools because of their participation in the Ask4MoreArts program.

Howard Gardner's work on learning styles or multiple intelligences is a theory of education that can be used to explain why arts integrated learning works. Children learn through dancing, singing, playing, painting, creating, movement, pretending, writing, growing plants in gardens, and a host of other ways. The theory of learning styles submits that everyone has unique ways in which they learn best and in which they may be challenged to grow. A school that uses the arts to teach core academic subjects such as reading, writing, math, social studies, and science will reach more children to help them succeed because more styles of learning are nurtured and encouraged.

Under the leadership of Leslie Coleman, principal of Casey Elementary, all teachers and students at Casey took a learning styles inventory based on the work of Howard Gardner at the beginning of the 2008-09 school year. Every classroom created visual displays of their learning styles, shared this information with parents, and used this information to group students in different ways for learning.

In the photos below, teachers shared representations of their personal learning styles profiles with each other. With art supplies available in the meeting room and an encouragement to let each representation emanate from their dominant learning style, teachers let their creative juices flow! Some teachers wrote poems or made creative bar charts, picture displays, or 3-dimensional objects. One teacher who scored highest as a musical learner sang her results using the notes on a scale to represent her highest to lowest scores.

Throughout the workshop, teachers asked probing questions and discussed real-life, classroom situations in which students learn differently. With video footage of Mrs. Kimble's class using movement, rap, poetry, and dance to represent ocean creatures, Mr. Howell and Ms. Jones shared how the second grade teachers at Casey used learning styles to group students during their rich study of the ocean that also resulted in the 2nd grade PTA performance.

During the workshop, I loved watching the faces of teachers light up as they shared their stories with each other. Learning about learning styles is empowering for everyone-- students, parents, administrators, and teachers!

If you would like to take an online multiple intelligences inventory, please see this site from BGFL.

If you are interested in learning more about Parents for Public Schools, Ask4MoreArts, or the Parent Leadership Institute, please call the PPS office at 601-969-6015.

Gallery Experience

Several Casey families gathered at The Mississippi Museum of Art for LifeShard's "First Saturday" on April 4, 2009. Led by Amanda Cashman, students and parents learned about Raoul Dufy's art and practiced gesture, contour, and line drawings. We learned that Dufy liked drawing and painting animals, flowers, boats and the ocean, and horses. More about the exhibit and Raoul Dufy can be found here. The exhibition is called Raoul Dufy: A Celebration of Beauty, but I was not prepared for how much beauty I would see.

After practicing drawing in the style of Dufy, students could choose to complete a scavenger hunt in the gallery, write a poem based upon one of Dufy's paintings or textiles, or play in the interactive corner with textiles. As you can see from the photos above, the girls were drawn to experimenting with fashion design!

Thank you to the museum staff for offering this wonderful gallery experience to us! I learned so much that I did not know before Saturday morning. And, as always, I enjoyed taking photographs of students engaged in learning and creating.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

It Grows! Can you identify the plants? There are herbs, potatoes, cabbages, radishes, chard, lettuces, and onions all growing in the garden.

Mary, Mary,
Quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells,
And cockleshells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

The third annual Rhymes on Rhymes Place is coming up during the last week in April. This event was created by Casey parents and is organized and led each year by the new first grade class of parents for first grade students. April is National Poetry Month. Let's get ready to celebrate!