Volunteering with Kids

Volunteering is a great way to teach children about appreciating what they have and helping others. It is also a great experience for families to do together to strengthen bonds. A guaranteed outcome will be meeting new friends and feeling more involved in the community. Children will learn new skills and get to explore different activities. Youth who volunteer are more likely to do better in school and less likely to engage in risky behavior. I may be rushing things a bit for our readers, but students who volunteer are 19% more likely to graduate from college. By encouraging your children to do community service now, you are making it more likely that they will continue to do so as adults. One study showed that adults who started volunteering as children donate to and volunteer for charitable organizations more often than those who did not. Studies even show that volunteering increases happiness! Who doesn’t love an extra dose of happy?

Check out Red Tricycle’s article What Gives? Volunteer Opportunities for Children for a list of some family-friendly charities in Atlanta for you and your children to become involved with. Fur Kids is an animal shelter that lets children help take care of the animals waiting for homes. Help your children put together a “Hero Box” for service men and women who are overseas. Piedmont Park’s Clean and Green program teaches kids as young as five how to keep their parks clean, as well as basic gardening techniques. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta has a program for little ones to do service projects around the hospital. Gather meals and toiletries with your children to donate to the Ronald McDonald House. There are also lots of walks raising money for different illnesses throughout the year for kids to become involved in.

You can visit handsonatlanta.org for even more organizations to become involved with. On the left there is an option to refine the search to “appropriate for children” which is super helpful. Tons of opportunities will pop up, such as helping at farmer’s markets, working with senior citizens, and assisting under-served children in the city.

Source: helpguide.org

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.

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