Words Alive, a leading literacy organization, provides integrative literary programming within 16 classrooms in Momentum Learning (formerly Juvenile Court & Community Schools), which includes a book club, writing program and annual arts project. Through this comprehensive programming, students experience attitudinal shifts toward reading, their education and futures, in addition to building upon their vocabulary, critical thinking, literary analysis and soft-skills.Each year through the Teen Services art program, our students have an opportunity to look at literacy through a different lens and find meaningful relationships to books and the world. As part of the arts program, students have an opportunity to make intrinsic connections to written text through a form of art they create.
This year, students will design their own stop animation film through a partnership with the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity. With this project, we focused on the theme "presence," and students read and discussed several prolific texts, including Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates), The Crossover (Kwame Alexander) and Letters to a Young Artist (Anna Deavere-Smith) with groups of trained volunteers in the classroom.
Students wrote a letter about themselves to a person or place of their choice. The letter served as a basis for the subsequent art project: the animated films. As a culmination of text, book discussion and art, students will have an opportunity to showcase their animated films at an event, open to the public, from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 6 at the Chuck Jones Gallery (232 Fifth Ave, San Diego, CA 92101) with an online gallery available on the Words Alive website to follow: www.wordsalive.org.
To learn more about the reception at the Chuck Jones Gallery and to RSVP, click here.
