Wolf Trap Brings Education Program to Madison
A student participates in Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through Arts workshop at Madison Elementary School.
Monday morning at Madison Elementary a trap was set for Shauna Jansen’s kindergarteners and the young Lions sat right down in the middle of it – with their eyes wiiide open.
The district’s Turnaround Arts schools in the Northside feeder pattern are in for a special week of artist residencies thanks to a partnership with the Metro Arts Alliance to establish a local affiliate of the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts.
Each year, the Wolf Trap program benefits more than 50,000 children from infancy to kindergarten age with a tri-pronged approach that emphasizes teacher training, student engagement and measurement of impact.
This endeavor is just the latest in a series of initiatives made possible by federal designation of Madison, Findley, Cattell, Oak Park and Harding Middle School as Turnaround Arts schools by the President’s Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The TA program blends the arts into all curriculum areas to capitalize on research which indicates that arts integration enhances student achievement across the academic board.
Turnaround Arts is funded through a public-private partnership among the U.S. Department of Education, the National Endowment of the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and other private agencies and brings arts education into low-performing schools in the form of teaching artists, art supplies and musical instruments.
Sitting in a circle this morning in Jansen’s classroom her students had a spell cast upon them by a visiting Wolf Trap artist who got them into their imaginary “actors’ masks” and expressing a wide range of emotions and feelings. Then she reached into her “story box” for props like colorful scarves that she managed to convince them were first fancy and later oh, so heavy.
“Awesome – magic!” blurted an enthralled boy named Camden at one point, caught up in the spinning web.
The Wolf Trap name is a nod to a creek that runs through the area in Virginia where the now nationwide arts enterprise was first established in 1966 on donated land that was later designated by Congress as the National Park for the Performing Arts.
The early learning branch of Wolf Trap was added in 1981 through a grant awarded to the Head Start Bureau of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
When Jansen was passing out the alternately fancy and heavy scarves she reminded the class of one of her regular rules: “You get what you get – and you don’t throw a fit.” As if anyone would. These scarves were “magic”!
When it was time for the Madison kindergarteners to head outside for recess it was time for the visiting spellbinders to head for Cattell Elementary and set another trap – this time for Mustangs.
