A Celebration Of The Arts & Beyond

The arts festival that students of Newtown Middle School have traditionally presented for one spring evening has grown into a school-wide, multi-media event that NMS art teacher Claudia Mitchell has informally renamed “A Celebration of Arts… and Beyond!”

On May 3, the entire student body was represented with at least one home economics project, poem, work of art, musical performance, dramatic performance, science project, or some other form of representation. Parents, siblings and friends were invited to visit the Queen Street school for two hours last Thursday night to see what has been going on inside the minds — and the classrooms — of the middle school this school year.

“A Celebration of the Arts” was set up in hallways, classrooms, the school cafeteria, Media Center, B-Wing gymnasium and even the lobby outside the school’s office.

In the cafeteria, Science Horizons students had set up the presentations they had created for a regional science fair they had participated in a few months ago. Many of the seventh grade students had made the trip to New Milford, where the fair was held, for the first time this year.

On Thursday, their studies were presented for parents and friends, offering answers to everything from the effect of motor oil on the growth of plants and the effect of light and nutrients on plants to the effects of water treatment systems on water and even the effect of music on the speed of dogs. (That final study, according to its young scientists, found that music can make a dog run faster, by the way.)

Also in the cafeteria were re-creations by the eighth grade Discovery students of their Rube Goldberg projects, Anti-Use Package Ads by seventh grade health students, booklets about fractions by sixth graders, industrial arts projects, and sewing projects by home economics students.

Artwork by students in all three grades of the middle school lined the hallways, from self-portraits to architectural drawings, from mock newspapers by 6th Grade Language Arts students to drawings by students who are applying for the Arts Enrichment program.

Music was in the background all evening, as orchestra, concert choir, jazz band and musical ensembles performed in the school’s auditorium and main foyer for the two hours of the festival. There were also student-run computer demonstrations to represent the technology aspect of the school’s curriculum.