What we are doing at Farmington, CT...
At Noah Wallace School, students aren’t just learning about history, they’re also performing it. To coincide with Black History Month, Principal Diane Cloud decided to combine two things she loves – history and theater – by coordinating a play beginning with Rosa Parks’ famous bus ride and concluding with other historical figures who stood up for justice, equality and peace.
The play, entitled “The Courage to Stand Up” was written by Cloud and Noah Wallace Librarian Maureen Gilroy for their fourth-graders. The play was adapted from the children’s book “If This Bus Could Talk” by Faith Ringgold, which the pair had read to their students. The students performed Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for their peers and younger students.
The group of about 25 students donned costumes to portray a diversity of figures from Rosa Parks to Hillary Clinton. In their roles, the students told their audience it’s important to stand up for what is right, no matter how small the deed.
Cloud has told her students Rosa Parks was in the right place at the right time and, because of the people she was surrounded by, the impact of her action had a powerful effect. But she still had to choose to take action.
“The bigger idea is that you have to learn to stand up,” Cloud said. “If you see something wrong, you need to stand up — you can’t let it just go by.”
Excerpted from Farmington Patch, 2/18/11