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IDEAL Evening at the Chrysler Art Museum

May 12, 2023 By Cindy Sherwood

Pictures are worth a…. you know the rest. Enjoy these wonderful photos of the student art exhibit, performances, and reception at the Chrysler Museum of Art as the IDEAL (Intentional Designs of Expression in Artistic Languages) residency wrapped up for upper elementary students at Norfolk’s Lindenwood, Portsmouth’s Westhaven, and Virginia Beach’s College Park schools.

It truly was an IDEAL evening as students shared their art for family, friends, educators, and community leaders. Throughout the residency, students created art that explored and expressed their unique identities. The public can view the beautiful artwork through June 11.

We thank all of our partners who made the first year of this residency possible: the funders–with special thanks to our major funder the Hampton Roads Community Foundation–teaching artists; residency stewards; Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach public school divisions; Chrysler Museum of Art; Richmond Ballet; staff and board of Arts for Learning; families; and most of all, the students. We hope they’ll remember this special night forever.

 

Filed Under: Art Exhibit, ArtsEd, News, Program Spotlight Tagged With: art exhibit, Arts Ed, arts education, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk Public Schools, Portsmouth Public Schools, residency, Virginia Beach City Public Schools, visual arts

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Arts for Learning Style)

March 15, 2023 By Cindy Sherwood

No, we’re not talking about this year’s Best Picture winner (although we DID love it!) We’re talking about springtime at Arts for Learning where we have so much going on—new residencies, workshops, public performances, and more for students from Pre-K to 12th grade!

Residencies

Strings Impact kicks off at Lakeview Elementary in Portsmouth.
John Jenkins leads Strings Impact students at Lakeview Elementary.

Strings Impact: Fourth through sixth graders at three elementary schools in Portsmouth have the opportunity to learn the basics of playing the violin—without having to pay or rent an instrument. Strings Impact is one of our longstanding residencies, and we’re so happy students at Churchland, Lakeview, and Simonsdale are participating in this after-school opportunity. Students from each school will perform concerts for family and friends in May.

Strings Impact at Churchland Elementary, led by teaching artist Tina Culver
Strings Impact at Churchland Elementary, led by teaching artist Tina Culver.

IDEAL, Intentional Designs of Expression in Artistic Languages: Older elementary students from three school divisions—Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach—are also busy after school in a new residency.

Teaching artist Jennifer Graham with students at Norfolk’s Lindenwood Elementary.
Lindenwood Elementary students getting started in their IDEAL residency.

Students are participating in year one of IDEAL where they’re exploring identity and community through poetry, movement, and visual art. Students are being led by A4L teaching artists Cindy Aitken, Gary Garlic, and Jennifer Graham at Lindenwood Elementary in Norfolk, Asiko-oluwa Aderin and Nathan  Richardson at Westhaven Elementary in Portsmouth, and Jackie Adonis and Valerie Davis at College Park Elementary.

In May, students will showcase performances and artwork at the Chrysler Museum, with their art pieces to be professionally hung in a gallery for a month for the public to view!

The Chrysler Museum’s Emily Cayton talks with students visiting from Virginia Beach’s College Park Elementary.

To bring students in the museum and show them it’s their place to have a voice is just an amazing opportunity,” says Anna Green, COO for Arts for Learning. “I can’t even bring words to how important that is, to make the museum accessible and for students to feel like they’re a part of a larger community.”

Students at Westhaven Elementary in Portsmouth work on an art project with Emily Cayton of the Chrysler Museum.

Arts + Learning Snacks: Tessellations

Third graders at Rosemont Elementary in Virginia Beach.
Third grade students at Virginia Beach’s Bayside Elementary say thanks for their new take-home arts kits.

Third-graders at seven elementary schools in Virginia Beach have a new (and so-not-boring) way to study for their math SOL testing in May. Thanks to free bilingual art kits, they’ll get a refresher on measuring perimeter and area by following instructions to design their own tessellations.  (A “tessellation” is an arrangement of shapes closely fitted together using a repeated pattern without gaps or overlapping.) Thanks to support from the Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commission and the Helen G. Gifford Foundation, we distributed 500 take-home kits to students in Title I schools in Virginia Beach.

And how nice to see these smiling faces!

Third grade students at Birdneck Elementary in Virginia Beach receive art kits from A4L Operations Coordinator Stephanie Jackson.

Public Performances and Workshops

Dino O’Dell gets kids hopping at Williamsburg Library.
Valerie Davis portrays Martha Ann Fields at the Downing-Gross Cultural Arts Center as part of our free performance series underwritten by the Virginia African American Cultural Arts Center.

There’s no excuse to be bored at home anymore—not when we’re offering so many different performances and workshops, certified family friendly, fun, and fabulous. offered throughout greater Hampton Roads.

With programs offered throughout greater Hampton Roads, there’s something for all ages. Click for the latest on our Events Calendar and make sure to check back often because we keep adding more programs. We’ve had some wonderful ones lately—from the “master of tricking kids into learning,” Dino O’Dell, on tour from Kansas City to Valerie Davis’s inspiring portrayals of courageous women in history.

We thank all of those who care about arts education and financially support these programs and more—we couldn’t do it without you! Check out the list of our supporters here.

PLUS THERE’S MORE! Our teaching artists love sharing the joy of the arts with children. Here’s James Cooper leading a Geometric MOSAIC workshop in Norfolk, Stephanie Lask teaching the graphic novel in Virginia Beach, and Amy Harbin guiding Rhythm and Me students in Portsmouth!

                                                 

Filed Under: ArtsEd, Donor Spotlight, News, Program Spotlight, Spring programs Tagged With: Norfolk Public Schools, Portsmouth Public Schools, spring programs, Strings Impact, teaching artists Arts for Learning Virginia, Virginia Beach City Public Schools

A Program that Makes a Real Impact

March 18, 2022 By Cindy Sherwood

A Churchland student named Legend gets fitted for a violin during his first lesson.

After two years of being shut down because of the pandemic, Strings Impact is up and running again in Portsmouth Public Schools!

We’re celebrating a successful kickoff of this long-running residency that introduces fourth, fifth, and sixth graders to playing the violin, with instruments provided by the schools.

The program is taking place after-school at Churchland, Lakeview, and Simonsdale Elementary Schools, with students taking one 90-minute lesson a week for twelve weeks. At the end of the residency, each set of students will show off what they’ve learned in a special concert for family and friends.

Tina Culver, a fulltime music teacher at Churchland Elementary School, is the A4L teaching artist for the Churchland Strings Impact residency. Although she didn’t grow up in Portsmouth, she says the opportunity to learn the violin changed the course of her life.

“I had such a wonderful experience from the moment I started playing the violin in the fifth grade—I just hit the ground running, and I was involved in all different kinds of music programs within my community, orchestras, went on to the governor’s school, then went on to college and eventually took that up as a major.

If there hadn’t had been programs like this available for me,  my childhood would have been so much different.”

That’s why Tina feels so strongly about programs like this that expose underserved students to quality arts education. “For Portsmouth, I feel it’s important to be a part of the program because a lot of those kids are not normally getting access to classical music or to string instruments,” she says. And by having her as a teacher, students “see someone who looks like themselves, someone who’s young, someone who’s positive and energetic, and someone who tries to make it fun and interesting.”

John Jenkins is the teaching artist for the Lakeview and Simonsdale Elementary residencies. He works as a band teacher at Manor High School in Portsmouth. Altogether, 52 students are participating in the three residencies, with a waiting list of 14 students at Churchland. The enthusiasm is high among all the students—one girl writes that she may want to be a professional violinist when she grows up!

Strings Impact began about 17 years ago after starting at Westhaven Elementary School in Portsmouth. It has rotated among different schools since then.

We want to thank the E.C. Wareheim Foundation and Portsmouth Public Schools for underwriting the Strings Impact program!

Simonsdale Elementary School principal Tammy King attends the first session of the residency.

Do you want to support arts education for students who may not otherwise experience it? You can make your tax-deductible gift by clicking here.

Filed Under: News, Program Spotlight Tagged With: arts education, music education, Portsmouth Public Schools, Strings Impact

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

#BecauseOfArtsEd: Celebrating National Arts in Education Week

September 16, 2020 By Cindy Sherwood

It’s a week to celebrate the transformative power of the arts in education. Here at Arts for Learning Virginia, we served more than 78,000 students during 2019/2020. We’ve collected thoughts from some of those we’ve impacted plus from some of our talented artists. Enjoy!

Strings Impact

Teaching artist Tina Culver leads the Strings Impact violin program in Portsmouth Public Schools.
Teaching Artist Tina Culver leads the Strings Impact violin program in Portsmouth Public Schools.

Mila Stith, student violinist, Portsmouth Public Schools: “I liked when we got to play in front of our family and friends. Sometimes my teachers would come and support us too. It made me feel good so I could show them what I could do. My mom would be so happy and proud of me and my brother.”

Jamita Stith, parent of two student violinists: “Teachers come, teachers go, but the fact that every spring they had violin coming, it gave the kids something to look forward to. And music is very, very, very important. My kids practiced twice a week and they got to take a violin home if they needed it.”

Tina Culver, Teaching Artist for Strings Impact:  “If there hadn’t had been programs like this available for me, my childhood would have been so much different. It’s important for me to feel that I can pay it forward and be a part of growing positivity in the community.”

After-School Creative Enrichment (ACE) Theater Residency in Norfolk

Christian Osho and Harmony Riddick participated in the ACE theater residency program at Norfolk’s Bay View Elementary School.

Joy Osho, Parent: “My kids both participated in an Arts for Learning program, and they loved it. Now all they want to do is sing, dance, act, and make people laugh!! Chris has found his love for comedy. Harmony has really grown into a young artist since participating in this program.”

Christopher Mathews, Norfolk Public Schools’ educator: “We put them in a place that said your story matters even if it’s a hard story to tell and you telling it can be therapeutic for you. But it can also be something that brightens the world through the creativity you bring.”

Brittany Cottrill, Parent: “I could see my daughter’s confidence and understanding of emotions greatly increase during this program. She helped out behind the scenes and was very proud of herself. She showed compassion at home toward me in ways I hadn’t seen before.”

ACE theater residency final performance
Everyone in the ACE residency pitched in to create a performance celebrating the power of kindness.

Mikayla Cottrill, Student: “I really liked the activities that we got to do, especially the ones that helped us with the acting part. And I liked that the (teaching artists) were fine, even when we were still learning how to do everything. During the performance, people on stage were helping each other. I liked the performance because people were able to see the scenes that we’d put together.”

Instructors help a student with a yoga pose during Rhythm and Me
Instructor Natasha Leshanski helps a student with a yoga pose, while supported by instructor Jasmine Marshall.

Rhythm and Me Adaptive Dance Residency in Portsmouth

Natasha Leshanski, Teaching Artist: “We want the kids to feel confident, we want them to be moving their bodies, and we want them to enjoy themselves. So everything else takes a back seat to those things. We’re constantly telling them, ‘Of course you can do more things. That feeling you’re feeling is discomfort because you’re trying something new.’ So as long as they’re willing to put themselves out there, it’s success day after day.”

Monica Morgan, Parent: “The number one benefit for Naomi was social, meeting new peers. Learning to follow instructions, step-by-step, was also very positive. The instructors did marvelous. They came down to their level and they were very patient with each and every one of the children.”

Naomi Morgan, Student: (Favorite part of program): “Dancing DJ! Doing dance moves!”

A4L Teaching and Performing Artists

Dancer Joel Casanova
Dancer Joel Casanova

Joel Casanova, Dancer: Arts for Learning helps me support myself in a way that’s also meaningful. I don’t have to sacrifice making ends meet with supporting kids and doing what I love. The thing that pays my bills is also affecting children for the rest of their lives.”

Storyteller Via Goode
Storyteller Via Goode

Via Goode, Storyteller: “I was fortunate enough when I was growing up to take clarinet lessons, and I lived in a school district where I was able to take field trips and I know what a difference it made to me. And so being on the other end where you’re giving it to the schools so that the children can experience that is just very, very rewarding for me.” 

Musician Jennifer Gammill
Musician Jennifer Gammill

Jennifer Gammill, Singer/Musician: “I feel like Arts for Learning is on my team, and they’re like, ‘Hey, we want you to be an artist. You can make money doing what you do.’ I feel super supported.”

 

 

Storyteller Sheila Arnold
Storyteller Sheila Arnold

Sheila Arnold, Storyteller: “I love watching kids’ engagement whether it’s laughter or just seeing the look on their face. They’re deep into the story and they can’t find themselves out. They’re cool middle-schoolers and all of a sudden they’re wrapped around my finger and they didn’t know they were going to do that.”

“People say, ‘They’re kindergarteners— they sat for an hour! How did you do that?’ I love it when teachers ask me how I did that, and I say, ‘I kept it interesting and they learned.’”

We want to keep making an impact on children’s lives. We’ve shown that we can adapt and continue our mission despite the challenges of COVID-19, but we need your support so that we can keep moving forward. Please click here to make a tax-deductible contribution—any amount helps.

National Arts in Education Week celebrates the transformative power of the arts in education. Passed by Congress in 2010 through House Resolution 275, the week is designated to bring attention to this cause for elected officials and educational decision makers across the country and to support equitable access to the arts for all students. For more information, visit Americans for the Arts, a national advocacy group.

Filed Under: ArtsEd Tagged With: 747 nonprofit, 757 arts, ACE theater residency, Americans for the Arts, Arts Ed, arts education, Arts in Education Week, BecauseofArtsEd, Norfolk Public Schools, performing artists, Portsmouth Public Schools, Rhythm and Me, storytellers, Strings Impact, teaching artists

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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

An Artistic Tribute to Marty Einhorn

                       A very special—and poignant—Arts for Learning performance this month honored the life and legacy of former board president Marty Einhorn. A4L’s Rita Cohen performed A World of Song and Dance as a free performance in memory of Marty, who died in 2021 at the age of 63. After Marty’s death, Arts for Learning […]

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, http://www.arts4learningva.org. 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

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