More than 200 students at Ansonia’s Prendergast Elementary School are getting extra art lessons thanks to some enterprising educators, an Orange-based nonprofit, and two Connecticut artists.
The program, which pairs two artists with the school, is being funded by a $2,000 grant from the Jamie A. Hulley Arts Fund.
Teachers Angela Coughlin and Keith Rowland secured the grants from the fund.
The fund was created by Fairfield University psychology professor Judy Primavera and her husband, Fred Hulley, after their daughter Jamie died of lymphoma in 2002.
Jamie loved art, Primavera and Hulley said, and the fund exists to support young artists with that same passion.
Prendergast Puppetry
That passion was on display in Rowland’s kindergarten classroom Wednesday, where a group of 16 kids were honing their shadow puppetry skills.
The kindergartners are learning puppetry to present American folk stories like Johnny Appleseed, “Rabbit Plays Tug-Of-War,” and Babe The Blue Ox to their fellow students later this spring.
A class of fifth-graders will write scripts to the stories and narrate the stories, and the kindergartners will do the actual puppet-work.
Jim Napolitano, a puppeteer from Milford, has been visiting the school to offer pointers to kids.
Rowland said he met Napolitano years ago and became interested in his art.
“I just always thought it was amazing, the shadow puppetry, because it’s such a different type of art,” Rowland said.
It’s also a good fit because building the puppets is easy, and relatively inexpensive.
“What does it take to make a puppet? A piece of card stock, a couple straws, and a piece of tape,” Rowland said.
The show isn’t stage-ready yet, so Rowland’s class took some time to practice their puppetry skills Wednesday.
A pair at a time, the kindergartners stood behind a “shadow screen” set up in the classroom and maneuvered their puppets under Rowland’s direction, to the giggles of their classmates.
Click the play button on the video below to see a short clip from Wednesday’s practice.
Pillars Of Character
A few doors down from Rowland’s classroom, fourth-grade teacher Angela Coughlin was teaching her students character-building with the help of Woody Wilkins, an artist from Clinton.
Wilkins founded “Dances With Wood,” a program originally designed to help children hospitalized with serious illnesses through woodworking projects.
Coughlin adapted the program to teach Prendergast’s “Six Pillars of Character” — trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship — by having students assemble “dream boxes” out of kits supplied by Wilkins.
“At the start of the project each student discovered their dreams and set a goal to work toward in life,” Coughlin explained. “Each month a team of students go into each classroom and present a character trait.”
Wilkins dropped by Coughlin’s classroom Wednesday to check in with the students’ progress.
Fourth-grader Emily Rich told Wilkins she thought the most important pillar of character is citizenship.
You have to get involved with your community, she said.
Article continues after photo of Wilkins and Rich.
A few minutes later, the class journeyed down the hall to Paula McMellon’s fourth-grade classroom, where Eniyah Lawrence taught her fellow students a lesson on another character pillar — fairness.
Eniyah asked fellow students how they’ve displayed fairness recently.
“I told the truth,” one said.
“I wasn’t self-centered,” said another.
Wilkins liked what he saw.
“I was trained as a teacher many years ago,” he said. “I really respect the challenges and needs for creative programming.”
Primavera, who founded the fund with her husband in honor of their daughter Jamie, stopped by the school Wednesday to check in on the projects’ progress. She said the fund has distributed more than $500,000 since 2002.
“It levels the playing field for all children. When you use the arts, that has no real right or wrong answer,” Primavera said. “Everybody’s a winner, and everybody can feel capable to explore, maybe, the other scarier aspects of academics.”
Check out the gallery below for more photos.
