Hosting Good Treats So You Don’t Get Tricked

For most of the 2000s, I raised two children by myself, and Halloween was among my favorite holidays, because I loved taking the children trick-or-treating. While we were out ransacking the neighborhood and filling pillowcases with candy – yes, pillowcases, we never did Halloween by half – we turned out the porch light and left behind a bucket of candy just in case somebody came by. It turns out that I just thought that I loved Halloween. When my kids were a little older, I let them go out with a chaperoned group while I stayed home to pass out candy. That’s when things got really fun. I like to confuse my guests. I also like to send them home with something better than candy.

For this, and the previous, generation of children, “Trick or treat!” means simply the request for candy. Kids don’t seem to really notice the “or” in the phrase. Once upon a time, there was a mild, if harmless, threat implied there: Choose to give me a treat or I will play a trick upon you. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as trick-or-treating became more popular and took hold as a great suburban tradition, this playful exchange seemed to encourage more interaction between householders and their guests, as adults would pretend to be frightened by the pirates and werewolves on their doorstep and give them a treat to avoid any unpleasant tricks.

Over time, this brief exchange eroded, and what we now have are pirates and werewolves who don’t even bring the notion of a trick to the door. That’s probably for the best, but I like to remind my guests of a little history. So when I open the door and see elementary school-aged princesses and superheroes standing there to say “Trick or treat,” I pretend to consider the choice, and then I might say, “Hmmmm. Trick.”

There is inevitably confusion. A chaperone will chuckle.

“My friend, you asked ‘trick or treat’. I have chosen trick. Trick me.”

I don’t push beyond just a few seconds. I understand that these are only children, and that time is of the essence, and they have an entire neighborhood to canvas before bedtime. And certainly don’t do this with the very young children. Many of the smaller kids are probably a little shy, stressed, and maybe even scared on their first outing. To them, I encourage you to speak very quietly, and gently give them their treat.

But the older kids, they can take a little confusion. Another idea is to tell them that their treat is a rock. “Now you can tell all your friends, ‘I got a rock’.” The chaperone, remembering It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, will also get a good chuckle over this, but I do almost immediately give them the treat that they’ve requested. The real treat, and not a rock.

At my house, the treat is not candy, but a comic book. This has always gone over astonishingly well with my guests, and they instantly forgive me for being weird. You can easily find inexpensive, child-friendly, comics before Halloween, although, considering the late notice of this idea, you might want to file it for next year. Many flea markets will have at least one seller with a box of 4-for-$1 comics, and many comic book stores will have some leftover stock from the annual spring Free Comic Book Day that they’ll probably share.

I figure that all the princesses and pirates who visit me are going to have more than enough candy for the next month already, and I don’t need to contribute more unhealthy eating to the pile. I’d much rather see children reading. Who knows, it might spark them to track down some more comics and some more books, and to keep reading.

Plus, of course, every season that I am encouraging a little childhood literacy is a season that I don’t have to worry about the temptation of having all of those blasted “fun-sized” boxes of Good ‘n Plenty in the house, quietly calling my name…

Calling all ghosts, goblins and boo’tiful princesses! The Children’s Museum of Atlanta is hosting our annual Trick–or–Treat event on Saturday, October 25 from 6-9 p.m. Families can look forward to trick-or-treating, play, prizes, crafts, surprises and more! Kids are encouraged to dress up in their best spooky attire. Tickets are $6 for members and $15 for non-members. Advance tickets are required; no tickets will be sold at the door. Don’t miss out on this howlin’ good time! To purchase tickets,please click here.

Decatur Book Festival

Did you know that the Atlanta area is home to the largest independent book festival in the country? In nine years, the AJC Decatur Book Festival has grown into a mammoth showcase for publishers, writers, makers, and artists. With panels, discussions, and demonstrations that will appeal to lovers of every genre of books, this year’s festival (August 29-31) is certain to be a huge success. The Children’s Museum of Atlanta is a bronze sponsor of this year’s event and we’ll be co-hosting a tent with the Decatur Makers.

The festival opens on Friday night with keynote speaker Joyce Carol Oates in an interview with her biographer, Greg Johnson. That’s at Emory University’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. Oates is launching her newest collection of short stories, Lovely, Dark, Deep at this year’s festival. She’s one of dozens of writers who will be appearing on panels or interviews over the course of the weekend, including Lev Grossman, John Scalzi, Karin Slaughter, Ted Rall, and Pat Conroy, all of whom are pretty well known for writing books aimed at grown-ups.

Meanwhile, as Joyce Carol Oates will be delivering a keynote address, John Scieszka will be delivering a “Kidnote address.” He’s launching a new chapter book for middle-grade readers called Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor thisweekend. The organizers have really come up with a great slate of programming for children and teens at this event.

There will be children’s parades both Saturday and Sunday, and stages with both performances and readings. For example, on Saturday afternoon, Tom Angleberger will be hosting a farewell to his popular and silly “Origami Yoda” stories – the final book of the series was published last month – and on Sunday at noon, the Center for Puppetry Arts and Serenbe Playhouse will be teaming up to present a 40-minute performance of The Wizard of Oz!

As for us, we will be in the Makers’ Space tent near the Old Courthouse Stage, just a couple of minutes’ walk from the MARTA station, from 10-2 on Saturday and 12-2 on Sunday. Our Imaginators will be on hand to engage you and have lots of fun. At the top of each hour, learn about teamwork and the importance of friendship as kids help our team act out a Bob the Builder adventure, “Travis and Scoop’s Big Race.” Then, on the half-hour, the indefatigable Professor Labcoat will demonstrate the teamwork between composite materials in a fun look at the science of paper and wood. Trees use the sun’s energy to turn CO2 into sugar, then make chains out of the sugar to use as raw material for building. If you’ve never seen Professor Labcoat make wild scientific connections between concepts you didn’t think were related, you are in for a treat. Be sure to stop and say hello! We’ll be giving away posters and you can enter to win tickets to visit us at the Museum!

After we finish our time in the space, the Decatur Makers and the Big Nerd Ranch will take over for some really neat demonstrations at 2 pm each day. On Saturday, they will be giving presentations on homebrewing, beekeeping, and the making of an iOS app, and on Sunday, you can learn about woodworking, quilting, and how to start your own whiskey distillery.

We are really looking forward to participating in this festival! Labor Day in Atlanta is always exciting, what with Dragon Con and football and NASCAR and everything, but we love books and we love anything that gets children excited about reading and creating. The packed lineup sounds terrific for anybody who enjoys reading, but the commitment from the festival toward children is really amazing and we can’t wait to be a part of it. There will be books for sale all over the festival, and we’d be happy to point you toward our friends at the great Decatur bookstore Little Shop of Stories as well. You’re certain to leave the festival with some great stories and some lovely things to read!

 

Photo Cred: Books, Babies, and Bows

Imaginators on the Go!

As our community outreach programs have grown over the years, our Imaginators have performed mini-musicals in schools throughout Atlanta. Since the mini-musicals are geared toward the concept behind the exhibit, rather than the details of the exhibit itself, they are perfect to use in the Connected Learning: Connected Communities outreach, which we shared with you at the beginning of the summer. Now, we’re expanding our existing “Imaginators On the Go!” program to make it bigger, faster, stronger.

Designed for students in pre-K through 5th grade, “Imaginators on the Go!” offers a program with a dynamic and interactive theatre production, as well as special interactive classroom workshops that bring the learning to life. The performances and the workshops are certified for meeting both Georgia performance standards as well as STEM guidelines.

The musicals and shows include “Storm’s a-Brewin'” for pre-K through 3rd grade (weather science), “Detective Readmore and the Word Bandit,” for pre-K through 1st grade (phonics, word placement, and spelling), “Georgia Grown,” for pre-K through 3rd grade (life science, plants and trees), and “Muskogee,” for pre-K through 5th grade (social studies, Native Americans).

The in-school experience of a mini-musical is not a great deal unlike what guests see here at the Museum, with perhaps one or two amusing adaptations to the different setting. But the result is certainly the same: in “Storm’s a-Brewin’,” it’s a crowd of cheering, clapping children learning what causes the sound of thunder, joining forces to blow the selfish Mr. Storm out of the room, and answering questions about weather safety. The kids love the break from the classroom routine, and while they leave pleased with the music and the Imaginators’ funny performance, they also leave having learned one or two things.

That’s why the program is important. It teaches kids through interactive give-and-take, songs, and a very fun story while reinforcing curriculum. “Storm’s a-Brewin’,” and all of the mini-musicals, are written to entertain, educate, and engage the children, and they’re all hugely successful in doing that.

We’re also sending out Imaginator Scentists to classrooms this fall with Science on the Go!, and four workshop programs: “Gloopy Glop,” which spotlights chemical reactions, “Team Body,” which spotlights body systems and healthy eating, “Head in the Clouds,” for weather science, and “Germs!,” which is fairly self-explanatory. No actual germs will be used in these demos, and we promise not to create explosions in your classroom.

After the show is finished, the teachers can use the concepts that are introduced to enhance the classroom experience. For example, in between some of the songs, one Imaginator may engage the students with some very quick questions and answers about their own experiences with weather – how to dress in the rain, for instance – while waiting for his fellow actor to return from a lightning-fast costume change. These questions can be repeated in the class, with reminders about how the actors explained things.

Doesn’t this sound like too much fun for one school day? If you are interested in having “Imaginators on the Go!” at your school or community center, please visit our website for more information, or phone us at 404.527.5967.

Hey Atlantans! Let’s Read, Let’s Move!

While many Americans, especially kids, are happy to see the end of the school year, we want to watch out for the big case of summertime blahs that can infect children. Studies have consistently shown that three things have been happening to children over the last few decades: obesity is up and literacy is down, and things get worse over the summer.

United We Serve: Let’s Read. Let’s Move is a national initiative that calls on all Americans to participate in combating summer reading loss and childhood obesity through volunteering and community service during the summer months. From the organization’s web site, “Working together, Americans can foster a generation that is less prone to disease, has higher academic achievers, and is more educated about food and its effects on health. These factors can have lasting effects on a child’s overall development and future.”

There have always been summer reading lists compiled by regional libraries, but with this initiative, which started in 2012, there’s a larger umbrella to unify the various state and city agencies that have been working to keep kids active. In Atlanta, the initiative has set the groundwork for Mayor’s Summer Reading Club as well as GEEARS – the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students, both of which work to get kids excited about reading and exercise.

For the third year, the Museum is proud to be partnering with these agencies and presenting a Let’s Read Let’s Move day this coming Saturday, June 7th. We have a full day of events planned, which you can read about at our website. These include a lantern-making craft, a scavenger hunt, a cooking demo, a bicycle helmet safety demo, and story time with Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.

Saturday’s festivities mark the kickoff for two months of events around Atlanta celebrating reading, wrapping up with “A Summer of New Adventures” at the Woodruff Arts Center on August 2. You can find more events by visiting the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club’s events calendar.

On Saturday, all of the children who attend will leave with a free book. The books that are being read and given away are Stripes of All Types by Susan Stockdale, Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street by Roni Schotter, and Amari’s Bike Adventure, by the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy at the Atlanta Speech School. All the books are wonderful, but we are especially taken with what the Atlanta Speech School has produced. This is the second book starring Amari, and we love having a young heroine learning about life in our city. In this book. she works hard to learn how to master a bicycle so that she can ride with her family in the Atlanta Beltline’s Lantern Parade.

According to Karen Kelly, Director of Exhibits and Education, “We have seen the research that shows that active kids do better in school, and we want to always encourage that as well as encourage literacy. We’d like to engage parents in their children’s learning, and a great, simple way to do that is to work on making reading itself a more cooperative and exciting time. We’ve learned that pausing throughout the stories that you read with your children to ask questions and wonder aloud what might happen next really does enhance learning, and keeps children motivated and excited by the stories that they’re reading.”

We’re thrilled to be working with the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club! We hope that you’ll join us for this kickoff event, because we have so much planned and so many neat activities going on throughout the day, and all of it will be so exciting. Karen said it best when she told us, “This is fun, y’all!”

SOURCES:
United We Serve
Let’s Move, Active Schools

Mr. Eric and Hope Hill

One of the best parts of any visit to The Children’s Museum of Atlanta is enjoying one of our programs, such as our popular mini-musicals, that are written and performed by the Imaginators, our troupe of professional actors.  Their work within our walls is only a part of what the Imaginators do, however.

In 2007, the Museum launched Connected Learning: Connected Communities.  This program repositions the Museum by defining it as not just a facility or location for learning, but rather as a valuable community resource for the purpose of education. The model is designed to put program direction and resources in the hands of communities, recognizing the unique characteristics and needs that each possess.  It is an outreach program that provides Museum programming in some of the downtown neighborhoods, visiting 22 different schools.  It’s in these schools, the Imaginators take on a slightly different role.  This is when the rock stars go to meet the public.

Eric J. Little has been with Connected Learning: Connected Communities (CLCC) since its inception, and he’s well-known to the children and staff at Hope Hill Elementary, in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward.  Once a month, “Mr. Eric” pays a visit to the kindergarten and pre-K students, bringing an ever-changing thirty minute program geared toward his very enthusiastic audiences.  They’ll often talk about literacy or basic science.  To tie in with our Sonic Sensation exhibit, this past April, the lesson was about sound.

Eric believes that his overall goal in the classroom is “building relationships that enhance the children’s learning experience because we make it fun.”  We can relate to Eric’s classroom experiences, as we constantly see this in the Museum, with young guests having so much fun that they don’t realize that they’re actually learning something!

Sharia Martin teaches pre-K at Hope Hill Elementary, and this was her first year experiencing the fun of CLCC.  She explained that “Mr. Eric” is a celebrity to her students, and that she found it hugely fun varying his entrances.  When he made his monthly appearances, she would sometimes surprise the students with his arrival, and sometimes build it up.  The results were the same: excited fans ready for a very fun change from the usual classroom routine.

Ms. Martin describes how “Mr. Eric” takes special care with reading to her students, being very participatory and outgoing, giving everybody a chance to contribute.  As we’ll also mention in next week’s chapter about the mayor’s reading program, literacy among children in this age can be improved by pausing to look at the words and helping young readers see the relationship between the words and pictures in a book.  We want to engage children’s curiosity about reading as early as possible, and keep them excited about reading after the school day ends.

The Imaginators are loudly welcomed by their fans at area schools.  At the beginning of April, we had the huge pleasure of joining some of the troupe at Hope Hill for the launch of our Ford Imaginator-Mobile. The students greeted “Mr. Eric” and his fellow Imaginators with a roar not heard since the Beatles landed at JFK in ’64.  Eric says that some of the children with whom he’s worked in our partner schools have asked for him when they have come to visit the Museum with their family.  Eric’s glad that he’s made such an impact that he has kids looking for him, but he’s most pleased when they tell their families and caregivers that he told them about sound, and got them excited about reading.

Sources: Science Daily, NPR

Welcome!

To introduce our new blog, Growing Into the World, Jane Turner, executive director of The Children’s Museum of Atlanta, writes about what she has learned about the benefits of play.

I believe that I have always known that play is a good thing. I enjoy playing; I feel happy and alive when I play; I forge deep friendships through play, discover new things about the world and myself, and I am refreshed. I have also watched my own children at play and I have innately understood that they were happiest at play. I could watch as they figured things out and began new friendships while pretending to be Presidents or digging in the sand to build entire cities. Listen to your child whenever they meet another child and want to connect with them. It is very likely you will hear, “Want to go play?”. As the famous and beloved Mr. Rogers stated, “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.”

What I have learned while working at The Children’s Museum of Atlanta is that play is a serious (but joyful) endeavor which introduces children to topics great and small! The benefits of open-ended and physical play are profound and almost endless. It is through play that children develop their imaginations, dexterity, physical, cognitive and emotional strengths. It is how they are introduced to the greater world in an environment that they control; it is how they “try out” occupations, leadership roles, team-building, problem-solving, and creative endeavors. It is one thing to learn in an academic environment that red and blue mixed together form purple; it is quite another to dip a brush in thick, red paint, draw that brush across a wall, dip the brush in blue paint and mix it into the red and see the purple! Concepts come to life; ideas become reality!

One of the most powerful encounters I have had while working at the Children’s Museum was when we welcomed Dr. Stuart Brown to speak. Dr. Brown has spent decades researching the importance of play, and what I learned from him is that the act of play is powerful and that there is a physiological connection between physical play and brain development. Play truly shapes the brain and has an enormous role in the development of the executive functioning of the brain. This means better ability to think creatively, engage in long-term planning, work effectively as a team, and solve problems. And, these are exactly the skills that are most important when young children grow up and enter the adult world.They are exactly the skills that will lead to new inventions and innovative solutions. Who will invent the next important technological advance in the future? It is likely the little boy or girl who is creating sand sculptures, stacking boxes, taking things apart, or turning somersaults today!

What young children do today makes a difference in what they will do tomorrow and beyond, and if we want a country that shapes the future, we must nurture and enable those who will inherit that future to discover what is possible. That is where the adults come in; it is incumbent upon us to ensure that play is not lost in a sea of over-programmed days for our children; it is why I love the Children’s Museum – it is a place of open-ended, child-directed activity. It is where children become painters, sculptors, dancers, engineers, builders, and chemists. It is a world that responds to their direction, their pace, their ideas, and it is a place that can spark true discovery.

Check out these websites and articles to learn more of the richness of play and the importance of this precious, simple, but profoundly important part of childhood. Then come play with us!

National Institute of Play

Dr. Stuart Brown’s TED Talk

Center for Childhood Creativity

Newsweek – Creativity Crisis

CNN – Play is a way to College

Jane Turner has held the position of Executive Director for The Children’s Museum of Atlanta since September 2004. Prior to joining The Children’s Museum of Atlanta, Jane worked for 15 years in the Healthcare IT industry. She served as President of the Board of Directors of Georgia Shakespeare Festival. Jane graduated from Kenyon College and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. Jane currently serves on the Board of Advisors for the Junior League of Atlanta and Advisory Board of Georgia Shakespeare.