When Jamie Yavorsky, a music education graduate student, was presented with the opportunity to write her own curriculum, she couldn’t turn it down.

Yavorsky will be one of the people running the annual workshops through EL PUNTO Art Studio, a multicultural arts education program offered for children and teens who reside around the city of Syracuse. It is the product of a partnership between the Setnor School of Music and the School of Education.

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the program but it’s the first year that there will be a musical component added to the curriculum. Yavorsky said this year’s theme is music and identity and that the instructors will be doing storytelling through music.

The program aims to combine performing, literary and visual arts for kids who are not being exposed to the arts in their traditional school environments. The workshops start March 21 and will take place every Saturday until April 25 at various locations, including the La Casita Cultural Center and the Point of Contact Gallery.

“We feel very strongly about cultivating young audiences and talent in the arts and this is one way to reach out,” Yavorsky said.

EL PUNTO will be using grants provided by Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sci-ences and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts to give young artists six free weeks of classes.

Children will work in production teams, writing stories and composing music to accompa-ny those stories, Yavorsky said. When the projects are finished the participants are sup-posed to have a storybook with illustrations, CDs with background tracks and narration.

The program is expected to attract about 75 students this year from all across central New York. Teresita Paniagua, the executive director of the Office of Cultural Engagement for the Hispanic Community, said it started out much differently.

Many of the children who attend are students returning from previous years, Paniagua said, so the directors strive to change the curriculum each year.

“I love seeing so many of the children returning,” she said. “It means a lot to me that they continue to come back.”

While Paniagua said she recognizes that adding music to the program is ambitious, she is confident in the fact that the experience will be fulfilling to both the younger students tak-ing part in the workshop and SU students like Yavorsky who will be administrating it.

“Each year I find it to be a very rewarding experience, I love seeing the whole mission of these arts centers being fulfilled,” Paniagua said.

Yavorsky said she is excited to test her hand at what she hopes will be her future profession.

Said Yavorsky: “We don’t get opportunities like this to write our own curriculum and then put it into practice very often, so it’s cool to have creative freedom and know that kids are going to benefit from it.”

Published on March 19, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact: ararcham@syr.edu