PRESS RELEASE

 

    For Immediate Release:  Friday, June 6 2008                                                   Contact: Tracy Broyles 215.222.6979

                                                           

 

SUCCESSFUL FELTONVILLE PARADE CELEBRATES THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF 250 FIFTH-GRADERS IN NORTH PHILADELPHIA

 

Wednesday’s Lifting Our Cultures and Families Parade Recognized

Year-Long Arts Education Residency Facilitated by Spiral Q Puppet Theater

 

PHILADELPHIA – On Wednesday, June 4, the entire fifth grade of Feltonville Intermediate School set aside their pencils and lined up outside their school to participate in a parade they had been preparing for all year long.

During the ensuing parade, all of the students joined their classroom teachers, school administrators, and Spiral Q Puppet Theater staff to walk a mile through the streets of their neighborhood. The event, which celebrated the culmination of a year-long artistic partnership between Spiral Q and the community at Feltonville Intermediate, went off without a hitch.

An estimated 1000 students, including 500 third- and fourth-graders from Feltonville Intermediate and over 500 students from nearby Clara Barton Elementary left their classrooms to cheer the fifth-grade parade as it marched in front them.

Before the academic year began, Principal Nelson Reyes approached Spiral Q with a proposal to integrate arts education standards developed by the Consortium of National Arts Education Associations while building and strengthening a sense of community within the school. The resulting Lifting Our Cultures and Families project addressed the fact that changing demographics and resulting tensions have been reflected in neighborhood and classroom dynamics. Feltonville’s student body increased by 50% in the last two years, and faculty, staff, and families saw an immediate need to creatively engage students in addressing such radical change.

Throughout this project, Spiral Q has facilitated ongoing dialogue among students and worked to re-create the classroom as a safe space for students and teachers to share their traditions, cultures and stories with one another.

Every one of the 250 fifth-graders that marched in Wednesday’s parade had worked all year with their peers to create original puppets, signs, and flags that express the strength that the school’s diversity brings to the community. As they held their artwork aloft and paraded through their streets, neighbors came out of their houses, toddlers waved from doorsteps, and the neighborhood paused to celebrate the work done by the neighborhood’s youth over the course of the past year.

   For fifth-graders at Feltonville, the Spiral Q residency served as the only artistic outlet in their curriculum during the entire school year, and each puppet, grin and cheer showed that they treasured the hands-on experience. The joy present at the parade reflected the sentiments of one student, who wrote: “some people think art is just to have fun. But it really is to have more than that. Art can be enjoyable, expressive, and an activity that can tell a lot about yourself. Art is also important because it gives details that you can’t talk about. So this is why art is very important to me, my class, and also all of my friends.”

To request visuals from the Wednesday’s event, please contact Tracy Broyles at Spiral Q: 215.222.6979.

 

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