ExperienceArt & Education

The Festival brings select children’s groups from around the world to perform and demonstrate culturally unique art forms, in addition to bringing some of the world’s best professional artists to entertain and educate children of all ages, we showcase many local and national performance groups and artists, who undergo a strict jury process. The Festival’s unique interactive arts environment provides children with a fun, dynamic, and accessible way to discover and learn about diverse art forms and cultures.

Learning-Focused Programming

Declaring that children should connect with the arts and the larger world are nice goals, but they ring hollow unless we have a way to pull it off, especially in an economically strapped, standardized-testing world that is cutting back on the arts and global education in order to double up on subjects on state exams. For almost forty years now, the International Children’s Festival has lived up to the promise of what can happen when people connect with the arts and diverse cultures, and each year it increases its learning-focused programming. Every fifth grade student in Fairfax County Public Schools attends one of several daily showcases of international performers. Content-rich, instructional materials used prior to the performances prime students for what they are about to learn which increases long-term retention of content. Post-experience instructional materials are used to help students process and extend what they’ve learned. Multiple standards from Virginia’s Standards of Learning are supported via experiences provided at the International Children’s Festival. Samples include:

Social Studies, Grade 5:

• Benchmark 1.e:  Make connections between past and present
• Benchmark 1 h: Interpret ideas and events from different historical perspectives.
• Benchmark 1.j: Analyze maps to explain relationships between history and geography
• Benchmark 2.a.2: Understand that cultures change over time
• Benchmark 3.a.2: Draw conclusions about how myths contributed to a culture
• Standard 5: The student will demonstrate knowledge of how past and present cultures influenced the development of the modern world.

In addition, teachers and visiting families are provided with ample research on countries represented at each year’s Festival as well as dozens of teaching strategies to make the research, culture, and performing arts meaningful to students. Vivid, engaging, substantive in content, and pedagogically sound, this is the stuff of real learning.  For eight intense days and echoed in the months that follow, this is the premier arts education event in the United States.

Educational Curriculum

The curriculum contains suggested pre-visit activities as well as post-visit activities to make the trip more meaningful for students. Teachers do not need to do all the activities; a variety of activities are presented so that educators can choose those best suited to their students and their schedules. It is suggested that teachers do one pre-visit activity and one or more post-visit activities.

Currently, the grade 5 Program of Studies contains a section for "Contemporary Cultures" at the end of the year. Teachers should consider using the enclosed activities in order to devote part of that time to world cultures at the start of the year in order to take full advantage of the performances.