Hope Hoffman and students dance their way through Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa

Organized and facilitated by Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine’s Theatre Artistic Director Reba Short, this Dancing with Books series featured musician Jim Hall, dancer Hope Hoffman and three stories, Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa by Jeanette Winter, A Tree is Nice by Janice May Udry and The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle. St. Elizabeth’s students and teachers explored the featured stories through song and dance in sessions throughout April. And every day St. Elizabeth’s had a session, the artists would offer an additional one to Museum visitors!  During the sessions, children read the books and learned to dance like a seed or tree and sang songs using vocabulary from the stories.

Teachers at St. Elizabeth’s have also benefited from this program. From attending the sessions with their students, they learned new ways to teach literacy through the arts, such as creating rhythms, singing vocabulary words, using body movement to make shapes of letters and words and telling interactive stories with props and puppets.

We hope that Dancing with Books will continue to inspire children to see the connection between the performing arts and literature and develop a life-long interest in not just reading, but music and movement as well.

Singing songs and dancing with Jim Hall!

Coming up in June will be Dancing with Books: Alphabet Dance! Children will use the letters of the alphabet to make fun shapes with their bodies. They will learn movements for each letter and create dances by spelling things out! Click here for dates and times. Dancing with Books will continue in the fall with a grant from the Beim Foundation and support from People’s United Community Foundation.

Renaldo, Brenda and Melody are just three of our Kids on the Block!

Hi everyone! Do you know what Mandy, Renaldo, Mark, Brenda, and Melody all have in common? They are our new Kids on the Block life size puppets and each one has a unique disability that they have come to understand and that they have learned to live with. Each puppet has his or her own story to share and when they get together with their puppeteers and put on a show, they dazzle the crowds with their humor, wit and adorable faces. Since November, we’ve been putting on Kids on the Block shows for our visitors free of charge and the response has been phenomenal. Funded by Unum and Sam L. Cohen Foundation we are delighted to be able to implement this wonderful disability awareness program and educate our audiences with both useful and heartfelt information. Check out our next Kitetails for another round of Kids on the Block performances, here at Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine or out in your community.

Click here for upcoming performances of Kids on the Block!

Cast members of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” participate in a peer critique, while "Cinderella" musician Jeffrey Sheerer looks on.

When these two shows were selected many months ago, we thought of so many ways all kinds of artists in our community could make valuable contributions. Having professional musicians, costume designers and playwrights contribute their expertise would not only yield great shows on our stage, but would provide our young actors with a unique opportunity to explore their talents under the mentorship of working artists. We developed a proposal for the New Clothes Collaboration: pairing young actors with guest artists from Portland’s thriving theatre community to design, direct, score, rehearse and perform Cinderella and The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The "Cinderella" royals. Sebastian Grimm as Andre, Gabe Walker as Prince Louis and Elias Grimm as the King.

Thanks to the support of the Margaret E. Burnham Charitable Trust, the Morton-Kelly Charitable Trust and the Simmons Foundation, we were able to make this dream a reality! Our casts (all under fifteen years old!) have worked closely with director Claire Guyer, choreographer Gretchen Berg, costume designer Christina Klein, lighting designer Nicole Sirois and musicians Jeffrey Sheerer, Gregory Reed and Shawn Cole to bring scripts by Michele Livermore Wigton to life on our stage.

We’re so grateful for the generosity of the Burnham, Morton-Kelly and Simmons foundations for making this project possible. We’d also like to tip our hats to our show sponsors: the Neudek family (Debby, Tom and Alexandra); Andrucki & Mitchell Family Law of Lewiston; and Sudzie Autowash of Scarborough.

As anyone who has caught the shows can tell you, the New Clothes Collaboration yielded magical results!

Be sure to catch both shows, playing alternating weekends through March 21^st. Shows are selling out, so click here to get your tickets in advance!

Youth Ranger Fiona talks to a young visitor about the turtles in the Ranger Station.

Youth Rangers run programs each weekend and throughout school vacation weeks at the Tidepool Touch Tank and inside the Ranger Station. They facilitate visitor interaction with activity kits covering environmental themes such as animal behavior, forest and water resources, patterns in nature, food webs, and Leave No Trace principles.  Please stop by the Ranger Station and ask a Youth Ranger a science question. If they don’t have the answer, they’ll inquire and get right back in touch!

Little Youth Rangers in training and their parents can visit this website for some fun science activities to do at home!

For a full list of our 2008-2009 educational programming corporate and foundation funders, click here.