After “A Swashbuckling Adventure on the S.S. Quick Center” last fall, the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts staff is helping kids undergo “A Storyland Adventure” by partnering with Cutco for this year’s Family Day.
Family Day is a free event open to the community, in which the staff offers many child-friendly activities to encourage interest in the arts, increase family bonding and demonstrate how family friendly the Quick Center is. The event is held the Saturday before Halloween each year and usually draws in over 200 people.
While the event is open to people of all ages, the activities are geared for very young kids, elementary age and some for older, middle school-age children.
Each year, the activities are related to the performance that occurs at the end. Since this year’s performance is fairytale themed, titled “Dragons Love Tacos & Other Stories,” the activities are recommended for kindergarten through fifth graders.
Once the performance is announced, Sean Conklin, the assistant curator at the Quick Center, starts preparing themed events with help from his coworkers, all of which is funded by the Cutco Foundation.
“Project preparation takes months in terms of developing projects, gathering supplies, field testing activities and designing decorations and backdrops, while the physical day is usually set up one or two days prior with all of our staff and arts education assistants pitching in to help setup stations and decorate,” Conklin said. “Everyone on our staff helps to run the activities and make sure the day is a success, and I think it has become a favorite event for all of us as a team.”
This year, there are four activities planned for children. At “Mermaid Cove,” kids will create a custom oceanic mobile and pose in the Undersea Atlantis Photo Booth. Next, the “Wizard Workshop” allows kids to build their own magic wand and then play with shrink-dink incantations and witches’ slime. In the “Dragons Den,” kids can create their own fire-breathing dragon, design Chinese dragon scratch art and take a picture with a good luck statue. Finally, at the “Fairy Garden Forest” children can build a 3D gnome puzzle, design a floral crown or create a nature terrarium.
With each activity, Conklin hopes children learn a love of creation and the public can interact more with the Bonaventure community. Family Day is considered one of the bigger events that the Quick Center holds, along with their concert series in partnership with Friends of Good Music, in hopes to draw in the community.
“We had a somewhat strong K-12 presence in our local school systems for a very long time, but our arts education offerings have always been lacking in terms of larger community draws,” Conklin said.
For family day, everyone is invited, both on and off campus.
“We hope anyone who is interested will join us for Family Day, as we always have an amazing time,” Conklin said. “We are also always looking for volunteers and student workers in our art education department, so if Family Day sounds like something a reader would like to be a part of or like an activity they would like to design in the future, please reach out to us, as we love working with exciting and creative individuals.”
By Natalie Forster, Features Editor
forstena17@bonaventure.edu
