Arts-themed self-care kits aim to help students polish critical learning skills

Getting an education in the age of the coronavirus pandemic looks a lot different than it did earlier this year, especially for children living in homes without Internet access. The Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State, in partnership with the Jana Marie Foundation, hopes to maintain a sense of playful learning during this time among younger students in households with connectivity issues.

The State College Area School District recently started distributing performing arts-themed self-care kits created by Medora Ebersole to be inserted along with the food items being provided to students enrolled in the district’s meal program.

Ebersole, the center’s education and community programs manager, said that by including an aspect of the performing arts into their day, she hopes to encourage thoughtful play and other critical learning functions among the students at home.

“My strategy with the kits is to encourage informal learning that is voluntary, self-directed and requires curiosity, exploration, manipulation, fantasy, task completion and social interaction,” she said.

“Partnering with school districts’ food services programs in the distribution of free meals to provide playful, performance-inspired activities that do not hinge on electronic devices and costly data engages schoolchildren of the families who face financial hardships,” Ebersole added.

The first self-care kits were added to some of the school lunches on April 2 and feature a postcard-sized worksheet for planning an aquarium-themed production (inspired by the recent presentation of Erth’s “Prehistoric Aquarium Adventure” at Eisenhower Auditorium). The kits will be added to bags of groceries weekly. The performing arts self-care kits program will run through Memorial Day or until funding runs out.

The kits are made possible by the Honey and Bill Jaffe Endowment for Audience Development, which usually provides funding for the center’s School-Time Matinee performances. Two matinees, along with the remainder of the center’s regular season and engagement events, were canceled due to the coronavirus mandates.

Ebersole said the self-care aspect of the kits stems from the concept that the performing arts help to engage the mind, emotions, voice and body, and to facilitate empathy and higher-level thinking. In addition, she said, the performing arts can be used in almost every situation as a tool for exploration and understanding.

With the kits being added to a family’s weekly bag of groceries, “it becomes more like something that all the kids or the family might do together,” Ebersole said.

“The Jana Marie Foundation’s strategy to use the arts as a vehicle for self-expression and communication came from Jana herself, whose artmaking was a solace for her,” Ebersole said.

Almost 600 kits were distributed in the first week, but Ebersole said she and the district’s food services organizers will gauge how many might be needed from week to week based on meal service requests.

In Centre County, according to the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, an estimated 12 percent of children younger than 18 live in households that lack federally defined broadband Internet access.

While Ebersole initiated the self-care art kit project with the State College Area School District, she said she is exploring interest in working with some of the rural districts in central Pennsylvania that attend the matinees.

And, with safety in mind, Ebersole added that each kit’s cardstock elements are minimally handled at the copy center then aired for three days.