As the Remake Learning Days festival celebrates 10 years of hands-on learning this spring, festival organizers in West Virginia are gearing up for their largest celebration yet.
From May 17 through May 25 this year, nearly 60 hands-on learning events are planned throughout West Virginia, with more likely to be added in the coming days.
Though the festival was created in Pittsburgh, West Virginia has been a key player since its inception a decade ago.
Despite the friendly college rivalry between Pitt and WVU, “in a lot of ways, north central West Virginia and southwestern PA are very similar culturally, and so it’s been really good to sort of solidify that partnership over the years,” says festival co-lead Canyon Lohnas, program specialist at the
West Virginia Public Education Collaborative. “It’s been great to see the continued expansion of the program, with the international step of having Christchurch and our friends in Doncaster and Uruguay participating.”
One key to West Virginia’s expanded festival this year: The organizers worked with the West Virginia University Extension to host a series of events throughout the state to better connect with rural communities and celebrate the learning opportunities happening there.
“West Virginia is super mountainous, so we’ve got some geographic challenges as far as keeping everyone connected,” Lohnas says. The WVU Extension has “been able to tap into those areas that don’t have as much visibility, where there’s great work going on.”
So this year, Lohnas says, the festival is “truly statewide. Usually, we have a lot of events in Morgantown because of WVU, and a lot in Huntington because of our friends at Marshall, and a lot in Wheeling. But this year because of that partnership with Extension, and also because the network is growing, we’re starting to see events in more rural places.”
Among the events happening this year:
- Jewel City Junkers: Kids and adults can “get scrappy” at the Huntington Children’s Museum, making their own art from scraps of wrapping paper, paper towel rolls, ribbons, plastic containers, buttons, colored paper, cardboard, yarn and much more.
- Shipper STEAM Days: Big Adventures with Bluey: Visit the Shipper Library at Potomac State College (a WVU satellite campus) at this community event which attracts well over 100 people each year (kids and caregivers) for activities based on the popular TV series “Bluey.”
- World Bee Day Celebration: Eastwood Elementary School will bring their entire school community together for two days of hands-on science learning all about bees.
Lohnas says the World Bee Day event is just the latest in a string of creative events that Eastwood Elementary has hosted during past festivals.
“They get the whole school to participate around a single topic, with two straight days of project-based learning. So in the past, it’s been all about water — talking about watersheds, water clarity and chemicals — or about trees and the importance of arborism and conservation,” he says. “I’m really excited to visit this year because it’s World Bee Day during the festival. So everything is around bees and the importance of those pollinators and how critical they are to the ecosystem.”
The school uses the festival “as an opportunity to build community within the school, but also shape their science exploration curriculum, which is sort of a unique model,” he says.
Beyond the events in schools and at children’s museums, West Virginia’s Remake Learning Days festival is happening in many unexpected places, celebrating the message of the festival: Learning happens everywhere.
“The coolest thing about Remake Learning Days is that it doesn’t have to be an education institution or organization hosting,” Lohnas says. “It can be a community center or a local business.”
One example: A new toy store in Morgantown is using Remake Learning Days to get the word out about the community offerings they’ll have throughout the year and their stock of educational games.
This year’s festival is “a really unique collection of a bunch of different stakeholders that we don’t really get to see every day,” Lohnas says. And the organizers expect to hear from potential event hosts right up until the festival begins.
They’re glad to have these conversations.
“Although we may not be able to offer the same amount of mini-grant support, and we might not be able to do the full sort of advertising and promotion that we do for the events during the festival, we still want those connections,” Lohnas says. “That way, next year we can continue to build the ecosystem. And if we can pull it off this year, with the resources we have available to us at the time, we’re happy to welcome them!”