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Blood drive
BLOOD DRIVE
The Community Blood Center of the Carolinas will have a blood drive with the city of
Belmont on Friday, Jan. 9, from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. The drive will be located at the City of Belmont at 115 N. Main St.
Come visit us. Every drop stays here.
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Students put spotlight on art
By TARA MANJARRES
- Thu, Feb 21, 2008
MOUNT HOLLY—Student performers were dressed in black as the gym darkened and the backdrop of the fluorescent colored rainforest popped to life under black light.
Fifth-graders at Ida Rankin Elementary School had been working for six weeks on the presentation as part of the school’s collaboration with Blumenthal artists. You could see every minute of their work in the performance.
Blumenthal Puppeteer Lona Bartlett has been doing black light puppetry for a quarter of a century, but this is the first time she’s produced a show using 120 student performers. Bartlett herself used to be a teacher and feels strongly about using arts as a teaching tool in the classroom.
“There are students with different styles of learning. Some will learn from a book or written work and some will learn because they experienced it through the arts.”
The roughly 30 hours spent on the show paid off as the students displayed their varying talents. Students were divided into three large categories: plants, animals and foods of the tropical rainforest. In small groups of mostly three, they rose in front of the audience of first-graders and special community guests to talk about their topic accompanied by hand-made visual aids.
From the food category was a team of three girls, Madison Lewis, Haleigh Grindstaff and Brooklyn Salley. The team had chosen to talk about the lime and its relationship to the rainforest.
They used a box with strings tied to the four flaps around each side of the box. Grindstaff placed the box on a table and each time they revealed an interesting point about the lime she pulled the string lifting the flap to uncover a matching fluorescent picture. The idea was clever.
As Grindstaff operated the box, Salley held the placard displaying the word “Lime,” and Lewis read in a microphone the material the girls had researched.
Being able to use their creativity to articulate what they had learned was important to all the girls, said Lewis.
“We all enjoyed doing the art so much,” she said. “It gave us a chance to express how we felt about what we learned about the lime and the rainforest in a new way.”
Salley said she also thought it was smart they were getting to help the first-graders. The grade-level was specifically invited because they had recently been studying habitats.
The lime girls are students in teacher Joel Lineberger’s fifth-grade class. He was also dressed in black and said seeing the conclusion of the project brought conflicting feelings.
“It was a lot of work and I think it’s how any artist would feel. Number one it’s a relief that it’s done and number two, I’m ready to do it all over again,” he said grinning.
Not only did the students have abundant hours of work into the project but so did the fifth-grade teachers. There were even days teachers volunteered to stay after school helping students ready their work.
Teacher Nan Kaylor described their efforts to collect enough cardboard sufficient enough for 120 fifth-grade performance artists:
“Well let’s just say we had to go dumpster diving,” she said laughing.
Kaylor was impressed with the results of the entire project from beginning to end but seeing the kids on stage was especially poignant.
“At this point they aren’t just students. They were truly performers.”
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