After the Minigrants are awarded and the projects are completed, recipients send us their Final Report, chronicling their program’s development, presentation and community response. We receive photographs, clippings, DVDs and other documentation that tell a story of enthusiasm and success. The most impressive reports we send on to the Keats Archives, to be preserved along with Ezra’s artwork.

Then, sometimes, a report will positively blow us away! Below, a selection of programs we found to be original, creative, often highly informative, and just as often, a pure delight.

 

 

A First Grade’s Snowy Day

Stanley Steele, Principal

Pocantico Hills School

Sleepy Hollow, New York

A 12-inch snowfall inspired the first-graders in Westchester County, New York, to create their own version of The Snowy Day. Each student contributed a sentence and a drawing, presented as a slideshow on the school website. Since then every first-grade class has added a snow-themed contribution.

 

 

 

 

African-American Shadow Plays

Jill Waltz, Teacher

Geeter Middle School

Memphis, Tennessee

The Geeter Middle School packed a lot of culture into its Black History program, with students adapting African and African-American folktales into shadow plays and performing them with puppets and sets they created themselves.

 

 

 

Tales of Our Forefathers

Susan Gerhart, YA Librarian

Calcasieu Parish Public Library

Summer Teen Reading Program

Lake Charles, Louisiana

How do some teens spend the summer? At the Central Library in Lake Charles, they publish oral histories, including interviews and old photographs, of family and community members. The result is a vivid picture of 20^th-century life in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana.

 

 

 

 

Mosaic Legacy Project

Robert Devich, Principal

Pacific Rim Elementary School

Carlsbad, California

Pacific Rim Elementary won’t forget the fifth-grade class and their K-2 “little buddies,” thanks to the large-scale mosaic they made for the school, based on the book Rainbow Fish, by Marcus Pfister.

 

 

 

 

Whirligigs Project

Bonnie Reeves, Children’s Librarian

Township Library of Lower Southampton

Feasterville, Pennsylvania

Call them modern American folk art, inspired by artist Red Grooms—or just “whirligigs.” These one-of-a-kind, wooden kinetic sculptures were made by students, ages 8 to 16, in a workshop organized by the Feasterville, Pennsylvania, library and displayed in a month-long show.

 

 

 

 

Haiku Graffiti

Dr. Meredith St. Clair, Program Administrator

Boise Public Schools

Boise, Idaho

Inspired by Ezra Jack Keats illustrations, street graffiti and Japanese haiku, boys and girls at the Juvenile Detention Center in Boise, Idaho, used all these elements to create deeply personal cityscapes. During the art project, the students pronounced Keats one of the first graffiti writers.