The Pre-School Festival of the Arts starts tonight at the Bliss Center – and for the next week – children from 37 pre-schools will be performing dance, music, and drama on the big stage. The festival was officially opened this morning under the theme: “Art Lives – Celebrate It.” This is only the third Pre-School Festival of the Arts and coordinator Leroy Green told us why these preschoolers need you to be there.
Leroy Green, Coordinator
“It will run until Saturday, every night until Friday. The program starts at 6:30 and on Saturday it starts at 5:30. The performing arts areas; dance, drama, and music, and there is an exhibition going on upstairs of arts and crafts. They will not be adjudicated, every child who participates in the festival will receive a certificate depicting exactly what area of the arts he or she performed in or exhibited his art and craft in.
The children are really our greatest resource for the future and they need to gain their self-esteem and their self confidence and nothing makes a child feel more proud than having an adult audience there, especially mommy and daddy cheering him and her on.”
Tonight’s show starts at 6:30 and it will continue nightly through to Friday. In addition to the performing festival, a visual art exhibition has been mounted on the second floor of the Bliss. At this morning’s festival, coordinator Leroy Green also launched a new poetry book which he co-authored with Alvin Ledlon. He told us why this is not just a poetry book.
Leroy Green,
“It is not just a poetry book per se. It is a book which contains 24 poems, 12 of them by myself and 12 of them by Mr. Alvin Ledlon followed by a series of vocabulary, context, and simple inference questions so that from that early age children can learn to develop their analytic and critical thinking skills. Many times preschool teachers lack resources so this will become an additional resource in their language arts program and since the questions are already there, they won’t have the headache of making up their own questions.”
This is Green’s fourth book and Ledlon’s first.
