Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Schools

Charter school adds new flavors to curriculum

This year, music and art instruction join classroom classics to give students at Wimauma Academy a taste of culture beyond the schoolyard.

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
Published March 24, 2006

It wasn't time for the timpani yet, but the drum section was shaking with anticipation.

Jose Guevara, standing as tall as his teacher's hips, held the conductor's baton a little uncertainly.

"Now we are quiet and the conductor tells you when to play,'' music teacher Hebe Tello told the classroom of 5- and 6-year-olds.

Jose's little face clouded into a frown. He concentrated. The teacher pressed "play'' on the tape recorder.

"This is a story with music,'' oozed the calm voice of a man. "The birds are flutes.''

Jose's arm poked toward two girls on the floor holding purple sticks to their mouths, sideways. On cue, they swayed back and forth to the tape's fluttering flutes.

"Ducks are oboes.''

Jose turned to the girl holding an oblong pole.

Then to the air clarinets and the children in the imaginary string session and then the timpani player, Florencio, at this point bouncing up and down, ready to pound the air with his sticks. Jose's arms, moving in circles, waved them all in.

Tello showed Jose how to bow and called up Emily Jara as the next conductor, but with a twist.

"What about a wig?'' she said.

The imaginary orchestra was one of many ways Tello tries to expose children at the Wimauma Academy to new worlds. The music program, along with art classes, are new this school year at the prekindergarten-through-eighth-grade charter school run by the Redlands Christian Migrant Association.

In music class, the students are taught about instruments and dances. They performed bailes from Latin America at a festival for parents, students and staffers this past Christmas.

She recently took third- and fourth-graders on a field trip to see a concert at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.

"I think they were amazed,'' she said.

New ways of life seem out of reach "until you show them something is a possibility,'' she said. The students at the academy, many of whom are children of farm workers, have never been exposed to certain types of art and classical music, she said.

Also, living in Wimauma, the children are isolated from the art scenes in Tampa and St. Petersburg.

"So my goal really is to open up different possibilities,'' she said.

Art teacher Cynthia Wortmann has her students on a waiting list to get into the Tampa Museum of Art to see the exhibition of illustrations by Maurice Sendak, whose famous work appeared in the children's book Where the Wild Things Are.

On a recent afternoon, her third-grade class was set to watch a video on Sendak and had painted masks on paper bags of characters from Sendak's book.

Principal Daniel Oceguera said the art and music classes stemmed from the school's wish to broaden the children's horizons and give them new forms with which to express themselves.

The school hopes to expand the program by acquiring musical instruments and is asking for donations from residents or institutions no longer in need of their instruments.

Art can spark a child's imagination and passion to learn, he said.

"Everybody has music inside of them,'' he said.

[Last modified March 24, 2006, 10:56:04]