Next month, our pandemic-born online CREATIVE CLUBHOUSE STORIES classes will have their first iterations offline in the physical world. New York City Children’s Theater Teaching Artists will use CREATIVE CLUBHOUSE STORIES sessions to celebrate Black History Month with 3 and 4-year-olds at the New York Public Library and four Pre-K sites in Queens. Each 30-minute session will invite young people to explore the book Fast Enough: Bessie Springfield’s First Ride by Joel Christian Gill and use theater activities to spark imagination, build literacy, and engage empathy. It’s an exciting evolution for the program and one that bolsters New York City Children’s Theater’s commitment to building and adapting flexible, responsive programming for young people.
As the aperture of our worldview tightened in the early days of the pandemic, New York City Children’s Theater sought ways to connect to our young audiences through the portal of the internet. The structure and trauma-informed pedagogy of our existing after-school shelter programs offered a perfect match for the needs and limitations of an online class that could function as a one-off drop-in or a scheduled weekly event for young children and their families. We adapted the shelter program curriculum to specifically serve a very young audience in a shortened time slot and offered it to the public in streaming and recorded versions. Over the next year, our Education and Marketing Teams built CREATIVE CLUBHOUSE STORIES into a reliable journey for the inspiration-starved imaginations of house-bound young people — a place to explore a story, create with friends, dance, and take a deep, resetting breath.
Over the next two years, CREATIVE CLUBHOUSE STORIES fully adapted to its early childhood audience. Toddlers participated in online animal dance parties, built monster hats, found a rainbow of various colored objects in their own homes, and staged a mermaid parade. CREATIVE CLUBHOUSE Teaching Artists lead month-long explorations of Winter, Indigenous Peoples, Black History, Women’s History, the Environment, and Pride. The curriculum, which started as an adaptation, developed its own contours and coloration. It became a place where some of our youngest New Yorkers could use play, a child’s best problem-solving tool, to grapple with the world at their own eye level.
And now we get to bring CREATIVE CLUBHOUSE STORIES live to children in their own home communities. Because New York City Children’s Theater is committed to engaging young people in every borough of New York City with our proven strategies for building literacy and social-emotional growth. We cannot wait to see how this program works in a classroom full of Pre-K students. We cannot wait to learn what their problem-solving play teaches us about a way to view the world. We know they will help us open up that worldview aperture and that whatever we see, we’ll use it to continue to develop CREATIVE CLUBHOUSE STORIES into a thriving wide-ranging program for very young people all over the city.
Thank you for all you do to help us get there. None of this work would be possible without your support.