Childrens’ stories come to life at Washington

LYNN – Washington Community School students took to the stage Wednesday and brought to life characters from their favorite stories with the help of teachers.Students made costumes from cardboard boxes, construction paper, paint and other supplies for their performances. Joan Roger’s kindergartners acted out and sang “Hey Diddle Diddle,” complete with the cow jumping over the moon and the dish running away with the spoon.Laurie Kralewicz’s kindergarten students rode cardboard box horses while they performed “Humpty Dumpty” and Alison Farraher’s first-graders used a hand-made, life-size gingerbread man for the tale of the “Little Gingerbread Boy.”Michelle Coscia, a first-grade teacher at the school, said her students practiced for a few days before their performance of “1, 2, Buckle My Shoe.””We are really into making things come alive for them and meaningful and interesting for them, to grasp their attentions and changing different styles based on the students. Most of my children are hands-on learners, so that’s what they do,” Coscia said.Donna Restiano’s first-graders did their own rendition of “Old MacDonald had a Farm,” substituting “Farm” for “book” and the “EIEIO” for “AEIOU.” The children sang about consonants, double letters, vowels and words instead of the animals found on a farm, ending their performance with confetti in the form of fall leaves. Brendan Kirby’s class of second-graders performed “The Three Little Pigs.””I played the little girl who passes out the bricks and the sticks and the yarn,” said 7-year-old Adriana, who asked that her last name not be used. “I liked it. It was fun and I was just afraid of the other people who were there because I thought they would laugh at me because of my hair cap. I really like to read and I really liked the part when I read the hard words because we learned hard words in our classroom. I liked doing the hard words because you get better at them and we are going to learn more when we get into higher grades.”The event, designed as much for the students as it is for the parents, is meant to teach students the importance of being able to read and to encourage parents to read with their children at home.”We try to reinforce as much as possible that the more our parents can do at home with their children and having them understand the importance of children learning to read, especially in kindergarten and (second grade) because this is where a lot of the basic phonic, spelling instruction is going to happen,” said director Janice Sheehan.”They are actually realizing the importance of children learning to read and being reinforced at home is only going to add to their child’s life. It is such an enriching experience to be able to read. If you can read, you can go anywhere or be anything in your mind and, for a lot of people, that is a wonderful thing.”In previous years, the students worked with their teachers to create literacy games they would play with their parents in the classroom. The teachers would read a story and the games would be a literature extension or otherwise related to the standard of what they were doing in class at the time.”This year we decided to do it a little bit differently. We would like to have the children be on stage as much as possible and act things out. It makes things more real to them and they obviously liked it,” Sheehan said. “I feel that from being able to handle getting up there, feeling good about themselves and having people applaud for them, they’re off the stage saying, ‘I did a really good job, huh?’ They were really happy. It is nice for them to feel that way about themselves as much as we can produce those kinds of results in a school setting. It’s nice.”