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“Snacks” Bring Smiles

June 12, 2021 By Cindy Sherwood

Everybody loves snacks…and our Arts + Learning Snacks are no exception. Look at the big smiles on these kids’ faces as they received their free art activity kits. We handed out 250 snack kits to children who attended the “One City Wake Up and Read Summer Kick-Off” this month in Newport News. And word has it that at Virginia Beach Public Libraries, they’re flying off the shelves  because “everybody loves them.”  

Who wouldn’t love an engaging, hands-on art activity?

Seven-year-old Everly can’t wait to dig into this delicious art snack!

Find out more about our Learning Snacks by clicking here!

Filed Under: ArtsEd, News Tagged With: 757 arts, art activity kits, art enrichment, arts integration, comics, mini-comic, Newport News Public Schools, Root Beer Comics, Virginia Beach Public Libraries

Arts + Learning Snacks: Meals for the Mind

May 6, 2021 By Cindy Sherwood

Take art supplies, mix them with heaping portions of creativity, and serve them to elementary-aged kids hungry for a break from screen time—that’s our winning recipe for Arts + Learning Snacks, which are now being delivered to area elementary schools. These art activity kits have the right ingredients for kids to use their hands and minds to make an art project by themselves or with their caregivers.

Five Norfolk public elementary schools have received the first batch of Learning Snacks, which feature instructions in English and Spanish on how to create a mini-comic. A4L’s comic artist Matt Harrison designed the curriculum, which includes supplies and calls for students to invent characters, plots, and settings as they write and draw their own comic adventures.

A number of artists and board members have stepped up to help assemble the snacks, following all COVID-19 safety precautions.

A4L board member La-Neka Brown helped assemble the snacks at our Norfolk office.
Rainbow Puppets’ Wesley Huff and David Messick were hard at work putting together the snack bags.

Storyteller Via Goode and board member Diane Gibson had the honor of delivering the first snacks to five Norfolk elementary schools: Jacox, James Monroe, Lindenwood, Tidewater Park, and Richard Bowling.

Another Learning Snack, the “Zen of ‘Za,” will be distributed soon. The snack is custom designed for students with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), tying movement of the body with lines in art; activities include students stretching to “make a pizza” and creating a decorative “pizza” out of the art materials supplied. A4L dancer Jae P Renee is creating supplemental videos with visual instructions for students. Two hundred of these snacks are headed to the Portsmouth Autism Resource Team (PART) for distribution. The Zen of ‘Za will also be provided to a number of schools for use by kids in kindergarten through third grade who don’t have an ASD diagnosis.

The two current Learning Snacks—with a new one now being developed—will be distributed for free to more students via additional elementary schools in Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia Beach Public Libraries, the Newport News FACE office, and community sites in Portsmouth.

There’s a little added bonus for Norfolk’s PB Young Elementary School from the Snacks’ initiative. Thanks to Office Depot’s “Give Back to Schools” program, the school has received $115 in rewards from the money we’ve spent to purchase supplies for the kits.

The snack kits give under-resourced students a break from screen time and the challenge of a hands-on arts project that aligns with Virginia’s fine arts and literacy Standards of Learning. Would you like to help bring more Learning Snacks to children in economically disadvantaged areas of Hampton Roads? Click here to donate.

Do you want to learn how you can bring Learning Snacks to your school, library, or community center? Start by clicking here for more info!

We’re grateful to our partners who are underwriting the cost of these “meals for the mind”—thanks to Aldi Smart Kids, the E.C. Wareheim Foundation, the Hampton Roads Community Foundation, the Portsmouth Service League, and the Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commission for their major support of this new initiative.

 

 

 

Filed Under: ArtsEd, ArtsED for Exceptional Students, News Tagged With: art activity kits, art kits, arts education, arts integration, autism spectrum disorder, Covid-19, hands-on learning, learning snacks, mini-comic, Norfolk Public Schools, Portsmouth Public Schools, Rainbow Puppets, Root Beer Comics, screen time, Via Goode, Virginia Beach Public Libraries

A Chat with our CEO: Kids, the Arts, and the Pandemic

March 3, 2021 By Cindy Sherwood

Tidewater Family Plus featured Arts for Living’s CEO, Chris Everly, in its March issue. As a parent, what did she tell her son when he was thinking about a job in the arts? Click below to read her answer! https://www.tidewaterfamily.com/learning-fun/art-folks-meet-christine-everly

Plus there’s much more, including how COVID-19 has changed Arts for Learning for the better.

Filed Under: ArtsEd, COVID-19, Staff Spotlight Tagged With: CEO Chris Everly

Dominion Energy Honors Arts for Learning with ArtStars Award!

January 27, 2021 By Cindy Sherwood

Woo-hoo! It’s a happy day here at Arts for Learning, as we were thrilled to receive the Dominion Energy ArtStars Award for Eastern Virginia last night at the Virginia Commission for the Arts’ live virtual conference. Dominion Energy presented the award, which comes with a $10,000 prize, for A4L’s “Take 10” digital programming, recognizing the project’s innovation, enterprise, and artistic quality.

When Virginia’s schools shut down last March, more than 350 hours of our programming was canceled, threatening our mission to connect students with the power of the arts. But our mission was not interrupted. Within days, the Arts for Learning office in Norfolk was transformed into a makeshift recording studio, artists took a leap of faith and tried something new, and our program team figured it out on the fly, including how to shoot and edit video while following strict safety protocols required by the global pandemic. The result: 118 ten-minute video segments that served as engaging and educational art breaks for students and families who were suddenly thrust into remote learning.

Take 10 was a major team effort,” says Christine Everly, CEO of Arts for Learning. “We had no budget, no prior expertise, and no production studio—but we knew we had to find a way around those obstacles. Especially during the COVID crisis with students learning at home, we needed to reach them through the power of the arts. And we also wanted to provide some income for our artists who suddenly found themselves unemployed.”

Participating artists received stipends for their work on Take 10. The program ended in June, but Arts for Learning’s commitment to quality virtual arts programming did not. Thanks to an investment in new video technology and additional training for staff and artists, Arts for Learning now offers dozens of virtual arts experiences to schools, libraries, and community centers. The $10,000 ArtStars’ prize money will support Arts for Learning’s efforts to continue to build a digital library of engaging and innovative new programming to connect students with the arts, wherever and however they are being schooled.

Filed Under: Arts Integration, ArtsEd, COVID-19, News, Press Releases, Virtual Learning, Virtual programming Tagged With: 757 arts, 757 nonprofit, arts education, ArtStars Award, coronavirus, digital programming, Dominion Energy, Take 10, virtual learning, virtual programming

New Stories from a Favorite A4L Storyteller

November 10, 2020 By Cindy Sherwood

She’s back, and we couldn’t be happier. After a three-year tour in England, Arts for Learning storyteller Sarah Osburn Brady returned to Virginia in August, her art and her connections to the storytelling community deepened by the experience.

Sarah and her family—daughters who are now eleven and eight and a pediatrician-husband whose transfer to Royal Air Force Lakenheath prompted the move to England—are now living in McLean, Virginia, forever changed by their time in the U.K. Sarah calls her three years there “a gift,” with highlights including being part of the Cambridge Storytellers group and “being able to travel and walk the landscape of so many stories, both historical and traditional, as well as literary stories.”

She believes her storytelling has changed, thanks to new insight she discovered while living abroad.

I think sometimes whenever we grow and change as people, it allows us to bring new things to our art form, and there’s something definitely that will make growth and change happen whenever you move to another country.”

Sarah first explored joining Young Audiences/Arts for Learning more than a decade ago while working as a professor of theater and communications at Hampton University. After the birth of her first child, she joined the roster, partnering with another acclaimed A4L storyteller, Sheila Arnold, with programs on the civil rights movement and two “women of freedom,” Harriet Tubman and Ellen Craft. Sarah also developed solo programs including Poetry and Jabberwockies, which celebrates the rhythm and rhyme of language through classic poems and nonsense words.

As both a performing artist and teaching artist, Sarah’s storytelling isn’t easy to characterize.

“I’m not a storyteller who tells just one type of stories. I tell historical, literary, and traditional stories, along with a smattering of personal stories and tall tales. I find that I do a lot of those different things. My style varies according to the story I’m telling, according to the needs of the program, according to the audience, all of those pieces.”

When she’s developing new programs, Sarah says there are some stories “that won’t let you go, that sit bubbling with you and then punch you in the shoulder until you let them out. Then there are other stories that, because we’re working artists, we get handed.” One of the stories she got “handed” in England was on Thomas Paine, the writer of Common Sense, after she was asked to create a special program about him for a festival. She wasn’t excited about it until she dug into months of research and discovered she found him “fascinating.”

Sarah tells stories related to Thomas Paine as part of a festival in Thetford, England.

“I often tell my husband that almost any subject, if you find the right way in, you can find that it’s fascinating,” Sarah says. “The first time I performed that program, there was a woman who came up to me and said, ‘I thought this was going to be boring, but you made it interesting.’ And that is part of my goal as a storyteller—to take whatever subject I’m telling stories about, whatever program I’m doing, and invite people in, even if they don’t think they’re going to be interested. It’s amazing to me how storytelling can help people be interested in ideas and clarify subjects that people thought they weren’t interested in or thought were confusing or thought were extra complex.”

Sarah previews a new choose-your-own adventure storytelling program on Zoom.

Being back at Arts for Learning in the middle of a pandemic means Sarah is developing programs that can work virtually. A new program, “More Than True: Folk and Fairy Tales with Character,” features a choose-your-own adventure approach that allows students to interact with her live and help decide character and plot details.

Sarah is also developing a new program focused on the stories of women who resisted tyranny during the world wars. We’ll share details soon!

Moving back to the United States during a pandemic hasn’t necessarily been easy for Sarah and her family, but she says there are good parts along with the difficult parts.

“One of the beautiful things is that Zoom and other platforms are allowing for there to be a comfort with and an ease of communication at a distance. So in some ways, it’s almost like we haven’t really moved because there’s regular contact with people in the UK and with the storytelling community there, so there are lots of good things.”

We’d call it 100 percent good for Arts for Learning to have Sarah back with us. Contact us at programs@Arts4LearningVA.org if you’re interested in booking one of Sarah’s programs, which you can explore by clicking here.  All are available in a virtual format.

Filed Under: Artist Spotlight, Arts Integration, ArtsEd, Virtual Learning, Virtual programming Tagged With: 757 arts, 757 nonprofit, performing artist, Sarah Osburn Brady, storyteller, storytelling, teaching artist, virtual learning, virtual programming

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Main Office
Arts for Learning
420 North Center Drive
Suite 239
Norfolk, Virginia 23502

Phone: 757-466-7555

Main Office

Arts for Learning
420 North Center Drive
Suite 239
Norfolk, Virginia 23502
Phone:
757-466-7555

Arts for Learning Virginia Names New CEO to Lead Arts-in-Education Nonprofit

The Board of Directors of Arts for Learning, the Virginia Affiliate of Young Audiences, voted at its annual meeting to name Anna Heywood Green as CEO of the organization. Heywood Green has served as Interim CEO since January 1, following the retirement of former CEO Christine Everly. Prior to January, Heywood Green worked as the organization’s […]

Join the A4L Mailing List!

Sign up to receive the latest news on arts integration from Arts for Learning! Thank you for supporting arts-in-education.

Select list(s) to subscribe to


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: Arts for Learning Virginia. You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact
At Arts for Learning Virginia, we’re proud to be part of the Virginia Commission for the Arts’ Passport Program. While Passport holders typically receive free admission and 50% off classes at participating organizations, all our programming is always free—no discount needed. To learn more about our public events, check out our calendar of events page here.

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