One Butterfly, Three Ways
It's Cool to Learn comes to Roanoke, and everything a child walks out with.
On Saturday, September 12, the Harrison Museum of African American Culture in Roanoke fills up with children, and we would like yours to be one of them.
It is free. There is no ticket, no registration, no form to fill out. You walk in.
A Book, a Film, a Blank Page
The morning starts with a story.
Nola D. Oracle reads from Amara and the Secret World of Butterflies, the newest book in her Amara's Adventures series. Amara has taken young readers through museums and history before.
This time she is following something with wings, and the book treats butterflies as teachers of patience and transformation. It is a strange lesson to hand a child in a world built on instant everything, which is exactly why it is worth handing over.
Then the lights go down for The Secret Pollinators, an eco-documentary about butterflies and the outsized work they do keeping the world running. It features Jaret C. Daniels of the Florida Museum of Natural History's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity.
Having just met butterflies in a story, the children meet them again as they actually are. When this same film screened at the Harrison Museum on Earth Day, the questions afterward ran long past the scheduled end, because people kept asking what they could do in their own backyards.
Then the Writers Lab...
What Your Child Takes Home
Every child leaves with a literacy kit of their own. A copy of the book, a bookmark, a coloring sheet and crayons, a sticker, and a butterfly life cycle set.
The book is the part that lasts.
For many of these children, it will be the first book they own. Not borrowed from a classroom shelf. Not shared with a sibling. Not due back in two weeks. Theirs, with their name in it if they want it there, still on the shelf ten years from now.
That is what three hours on a Saturday can leave behind.
Come
Saturday, September 12
10:00 AM to 1:00 PM
Harrison Museum of African American Culture
Roanoke, Virginia
Free. No registration. Walk in.
The It's Cool to Learn program is built for students in grades K through 5, early readers, and young writers just finding their voice. Bring your child. Bring your neighbor's child. Bring the whole classroom if you teach one. There is room.
If you are too far from Roanoke to make it, you can still put a child in that room. Twenty-five dollars sponsors one literacy kit, and every kit goes home with a child who might not otherwise own a book.
And if you know one family in Roanoke, send them this. That is the entire ask.
See you Saturday.