BY: Ambria Davis
ArtWorks Earth’s Heart: Connecting Cultures is great for teaching different cultures to the younger and curious generations.
Connecting Cultures is taught by Kelly Bazam at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. She specializes her teaching very short lessons of different cultures to the pre-k students. Her goal is to “introduce young learners to the basic greetings, visual arts, music, clothing, and traditions of the country in focus.” Ms. Bazam focuses on different countries each month. This month, in March, she is teaching New Zealand. Next month, in April, she’ll teach about Greece and for the next two months, she will teach Thailand and The Democratic Republic of the Congo. She’s already taught 14 countries.
She teaches language arts, visual arts, performing arts, and culinary arts. Each of these arts are taught one Thursday each week. Usually, there are four weeks in a month, however, some months will have an extra fifth week and that week focuses on architecture. With architecture, the children learn about the Great Wall of China and Egyptian Pyramids. During the performing arts, the children listen to and dance with homemade music instruments. With culinary arts, the children make a country’s snack and even take the recipe home with them.
On Thursday, March 7th, Ms. Bazam taught about New Zealand’s visual art. She first teaches about the culture on a sheet that is shown in the first picture below, then they do a project. The project was making a hipi or the New Zealand sheep with paper plates, black construction paper, crayons, cotton balls, glue and googly eyes, as shown below.
Ms. Bazam mentioned that they would love to have and teach new curious minds on the different cultures of the world.
This is a free event every Thursday from 2:30 – 3:00 pm. There are 25 seats available and is taught in the Kids Gallery of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
If you are interested in this event, then you can see more at their website: https://mmfa.org/discover/artworks/.
There are more events and art exhibits on their main website that you can visit at https://mmfa.org/.