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Preschoolers Concoct Imagination With Art

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How do you make a foot pizza? Or an elbow pizza? What about a hand pizza?

Tough questions, but not for a group of preschoolers at Vanalden Avenue Children’s Center in Reseda, where “Miss Priscilla” has been a kind of artist-in-residence for the last seven weeks.

Using nothing more than elastic bands and her limbs, she challenged the 20 children to stretch the straps into a variety of make-believe foods during a noisy, playful session Thursday morning. Afterward, it was time to say goodbye.

“Very nice to be with you, very nice to be with you, goodbye, goodbye” the group sang to the tune of “Frere Jacques.” And then? A huge group hug.

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“I just love it,” she said afterward, in between her final classes at the school. In the grown-up world, she’s Priscilla Mariani, a North Hollywood actress and mother of two who has been working with four groups of Vanalden children twice a week in a pilot program called Art Start.

“It’s kind of like an extension of what I’m already doing at home,” she explained of her hyperkinetic sessions in which she uses music, dance and theater to stimulate the kids’ minds and motor skills.

Developed by the Los Angeles County Music Center’s education division, the seven-week program is designed to introduce preschool children and teachers to the ways that performing arts can be utilized in the classroom.

“When the artist leaves, the idea is that the teacher can carry on,” said Lynda Jenner, who helped launch Art Start at four Los Angeles-area preschools this year. Created at the Wolf Trap Institute in Virginia in 1981, the program is currently underway in seven states.

Mariani said she especially enjoys working with preschoolers since their imaginations are generally looser and less clouded by the rules and restrictions of the classroom.

“The kids just come alive,” she said. “It just sparks something that wasn’t there before.”

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