Getting down to the art of things at festival
By Deb GauArticle Photos
WALNUT GROVE - Art doesn't always happen in a studio. Sometimes it involves moving to the beat, as a gymnasium full of second-graders were doing on Thursday morning at Walnut Grove School.
As instructor Ramona Larson counted down from eight, the kids bent their bodies into "shapes" lower and lower to the ground.
"What's half of eight? When I get to four, you should be halfway down," Larson said. "You also did some math there."
Dance was just one of the art forms available for area students to take part in during the Elementary Prairie Winds Art Festival in Walnut Grove.
"It's an opportunity for kids to experience the different forms of art, that are appropriate to an elementary student," said festival coordinator Tom Vondracek.
Thursday's festival drew K-8 students from Westbrook, Walnut Grove and Balaton, and artists of different media from around the region.
"We try to find local artists," Vondracek said. Activities ranged from dance and creative writing to performances of Irish traditional music.
And some of the activities were plain goofy fun. As a group of Walnut Grove seventh-graders found out, you can get into the spirit of theater by putting on a show with homemade sock puppets.
The kids glued button eyes and pipe cleaner mustaches on their puppets with a little help from students in the Southwest Minnesota State University drama program.
Tom Yang's puppet had horns and a pipe cleaner sword.
"He's a dark knight," Yang said.
Alex Burns made a puppet with green curlicues running down the top of its head.
"It was supposed to be hair. I was kind of going for a punk rocker," he said.
Earlier that morning, Burns said, the group got to learn karate in the Walnut Grove community center. It was fun, he said, "but it gets kind of hot in there."
At the end of the day, awards were presented for entries in the festival's student art show.
"I hope I get one," Walnut Grove second-grader Rachel VanMeveren said as the kids ate lunch near the art displays. "I did that picture with the blue house."
The second-graders said they were having fun.
"It's good," Michelle Vue said.
"I liked doing the dance shapes," Parker Freeberg said.
Meanwhile, Walnut Grove teachers Monica Otto and Darci Tietz said they liked the opportunity students had in attending the art fest.
"It's a great experience, with all the different cultures," Otto said.
