By Rachel Tusler | Development Associate
Thank you for your generous support of Oregon Children’s Theatre!
In March, we closed our production of Locomotion, a lyrical and thoughtful story about an eleven-year-old boy dealing with the loss of his parents. 5,384 students from 75 schools in Oregon and Southwest Washington attended an OCT school performance of Locomotion. OCT provided full scholarships to 1,011 students and partial scholarships to 286 students.
OCT invited the teachers to attend a complimentary performance to preview the play before bringing their classes, and offered teachers the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet and learn from the award-winning Locomotion author and playwright Jacqueline Woodson. We also created free, in-depth resource guides for teachers who attended field trip performances of Locomotion, helping teachers directly connect the play to required learning benchmarks across a range of grade levels.
In addition, OCT facilitated a post-show discussion following every school performance of Locomotion, to engage students in thoughtful discussions about the themes of the play. And every audience member received a free writing journal, with prompts to encourage them to express themselves in writing.
We received very positive feedback from the teachers and students who attended Locomotion. A teacher whose class received a full scholarship to attend wrote:
“Thank you so much for allowing our students at attend this play…I think it really impacted a lot of them. They have already begun to use their journals for free writing.”
Another teacher wrote:
“We brought our third and fourth graders to Locomotion yesterday and as we teachers were talking after school…we think it’s the best play we’ve ever been to. The emotion and story line both came through so well and made us all want to begin writing the instant we got back to school.”
And a 3rd-grade student gave us this feedback:
“That play inspired me to start writing. That notebook you gave out at the end…I filled up the whole thing”
Please feel free to contact us if we can provide any additional information about Locomotion or Oregon Children's Theatre’s educational services for disadvantaged schools. Thank you again for your support!
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