| The Village Learning Place’s primary mission is to be a community library and learning center that provides free access to information, resources and educational programs to promote literacy, cultural awareness and lifelong learning. The VLP is located in the Charles Village neighborhood.
At the Village Learning Place, I provide art enrichment activities for the after school programs, develop art activities for special events and provide additional artistic support to a number of other projects.
The Village Learning Place is a former Enoch Pratt Free Library branch that, when closed by the city, was re-opened as a nonprofit community center. While continuing to loan books to the public, the VLP now also provides a wide variety of educational programs. I work with three different age groups in the VLP’s two after school programs. The programs are REAP (Reading Enrichment After school Program) and Study Buddies. REAP includes students from grades K-3 in two classes, and Study Buddies provides one-on-one tutoring for students in grades 3-5.
In this picture, I’m working with Nia Parks from the second and third grade REAP class. This photo was taken during one of our special events. The project we are working on is a Christmas card. The children are using notions of pattern and repetition to represent the messages on their cards.
I try to tie art lessons at the VLP into the notion of literacy. In REAP, this is something that I often achieve by creating art lessons which relate to the stories being discussed by the regular after school teachers. For Study Buddies and special events, incorporating art and literacy requires a bit more creativity, though the two seem like a natural match to me.
The primacy of literacy is the most prominent (but by no means the only) daily reminder of how well matched my own values are to those of the VLP. |
