CHILDREN BRING POEMS TO LIFE IN FILM

Come up here, O dusty feet!

Here is fairy bread to eat. . . .

And when you have eaten well,

Fairy stories hear and tell. -- “Fairy Bread” by Robert Louis Stevenson

Thirty San Diego schoolchildren have created 20 minutes of enchantment in “Poems of Wonder and Magic,” a film anthology of nine classic children’s poems.

The project was a way to foster the elementary schoolchildren’s appreciation of poetry and, by filming in various natural settings in San Diego County, strengthen their connection with the natural world.

The poems (including those by Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Graves, Rose Flyeman, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Harold Monro) are presented as nine separate scenes, each in a setting appropriate to the story line.

For example, “Overheard on a Saltmarsh,” by Harold Monro, was filmed on the salt marshes of Cardiff and Mission Bay, and the “Spirit of the Birch,” by Arthur Ketchum, was partly filmed in El Cajon.

The production, made for San Diego State University’s Demonstration Lab Project at Kennedy Elementary School by SDSU’s Learning Resource Center, will be shown on KPBS, Channel 15, tonight at 5:30 p.m. (It will also appear on Southwestern Cable, Channel 15, next Friday at 9:30 p.m., and June 16 at 5 p.m., and on Times Mirror Dimension Cable Service, Channel 2, next Friday, June 12 and June 13 at 2:30 p.m.)

How did the youngsters like the project? “I had a lot of fun,” said Josh Lewis, 6, who is an elf in “I’d Love to Be a Fairy’s Child” and appears in “Fairy Bread.”

Josh Friedman, 9, who has a part in “Fairies,” has the self-awareness that comes with a little more age. “I was really nervous,” he said, but also added that “I felt really good when they showed my name (on the credits).”

Stacy Robinson, 11, who is in “Have You Watched the Fairies?” and “Fairies,” hopes to do more acting and called the sequences “poems come true.”

Funded in part by the North County Community Television Foundation, the film idea was conceived by local art educator Barbara Ross of the Ilan Lael Foundation, a San Diego organization devoted to raising community awareness of the arts.

Ross said she was in internationally known artist James Hubbell’s home near Julian “and I was remembering how I used to listen to ‘Let’s Pretend’ (a radio show). I thought then about the possibility of doing TV productions of fairy tales, folk tales or children’s poetry” at Hubbell’s home, which is a fantasy land of sculptures, mosaics and decorated tiles. (There will be an open house, sponsored by Ilan Lael, at the Hubbell home Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.)

In time, Ross met Carol Macy, acting instructor at the Old Globe Theatre and a drama teacher with the Chula Vista school district, and Carol Riordan, a producer at SDSU’s Learning Resource Center. The three women visited Hubbell and his wife, Ann, and Hubbell offered his home as a setting for some of the filming.

It was decided the project should be a learning experience for children as well as an artistic production. “Poetry was an appropriate choice because poetry involves images, words, sounds, rhythm--and thereby fosters whole-brain learning,” said Ross.

“This production (one of about 40 done by the center within a year) took us to a level of sophistication never achieved before,” said Richard Gerrero, assistant director for media production at the Learning Resource Center. “It stretched our ability to do something of this dimension--not only in terms of its potential usefulness in the classroom, but in terms of our own growth and development.”

The program will be used at Kennedy to supplement the reading and language curriculum and will be available to all city and county schools. It also can be used in teacher education classes, he said. (Teachers can call The Learning Channel to request showings.)

“I think it is probably the more creative way of trying to teach--if you can capture the interest of the child, then you can teach him something. That is the challenge lost so often in teaching . . . . We’ve come a long way from education being fun--and it can be,” said Gerrero.

Said Gerrero, “When we had the premiere, I saw tears in adults’ eyes. This has a big emotional content for viewers,” he added.

“It touches the child within adults,” said Riordan.

“It’s not a slick, professional, Steven Spielberg production, but it aspires to a level of professionalism, and it maintains a charm that reaches people’s innocence,” said Riordan.

The poems all were taken from an anthology of children’s poems by Blanche Jennings Thompson, called “Silver Pennies,” which has been in Riordan’s family since 1926. Riordan called the anthology “a book full of magic, fairies and wonder. We wanted to bring forth that charm and innocence . . .”