Show and Tell

Welcome to Show and Tell, a place with information to extend the learning at home. It has useful information about the performance to reference when asking children about their day.

What Red Sky, the producer of The Great Mountain, has to say about the performance:

“The Great Mountain is an adventure story that inspires, entertains and captures the imagination of kids and families alike. Young Nuna has started to hear things she can’t figure out. Realizing she has inherited the ability to hear the spirits of rushing rivers and soaring mountains, Nuna’s grandmother takes her to the river and entrusts her to a boatman who brings her to where a glacier is melting and the spirit of a great mountain weeps. Does Nuna have the power to answer the mountain’s cry? Inspired by the Aboriginal story of Jumping Mouse, a young girl discovers the transformative power of nature and the importance of courage.”

Read what Center for the Performing Arts associate editor Jennifer Pencek has to say about the capacity of The Great Mountain to be a teaching tool to help youth and their families learn about the environment-- http://www.cpa.psu.edu/features/feature-003.html

The Great Mountain is inspired by the Northern Plains aboriginal story Jumping Mouse. The story can also be found in the picture book The Story of Jumping Mouse: A Native American Legend, retold and illustrated by John Steptoe, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, c1984 [40]p.: ISBN 0688019021.

Red Sky in their teaching materials asks youth to think about the process of change in their own community, and create an action plan with the purpose of ensuring the positive future of a local site. Here are links to two suggested activities based on that charge:

• Visit http://www.greatsunflower.org/ for how to participate in collecting data on bee pollination in yards, gardens, schools and parks. The Great Sunflower Project has been gathering information on pollinator service since 2008, and now has the largest single body of information about bee pollinator service in North America. Thanks to thousands of observers, they can determine where pollinator service is strong or weak compared to averages.
  
  
• At http://uwarboretum.org/eps/research_act_classroom/rain_garden_curriculum.php you will find a rain garden curriculum sampler for ideas for building a rain garden of your own. To see a working rain garden in State College, visit the corner of Beaver and Allen Street, in front of and across from Schlow Library.
  
  

To see the transformation of a local site on a really big scale, take a field trip to visit the new wetland education center that Alan Sam, State College Borough’s environmental coordinator and arborist, spearheaded--http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2012/06/27/westerly_parkway_revitalization.aspx