This is the second year the Greater Cincinnati area will host Remake Learning Days and, with pandemic restrictions being lifted, organizers expect people will participate in droves during May 14-21.

“There’s definitely a hunger — people wanting that social interaction, something to do, to see faces out in the community,” said Seth Longland, outreach services branch manager at Kentucky’s Kenton County Public Library.

Jill Morenz, director of community initiative and communications, The Catalytic Fund, agrees: “Remake Learning Days offers something new they can’t do at home.”

This year, there will be more than 100 free events in Greater Cincinnati as part of Remake Learning Days. The COVID-19 pandemic forced a mostly virtual event last year after it caused the 2020 event to be canceled. But while those virtual 2021 events were not as well attended as organizers hoped, Morenz saw a silver living: “We made all these connections with all these organizations, so when we came back (this year), they understood who we are and what we do.”

Those participating organizations also are helping to promote this year’s festival.

Remake Learning Days in this region will kick off on May 14 as “Remake Learning Day.” The Covington Branch of the Kenton County Public Library will hold 19 events that day.

“That’s really fun and a great way to get families to come out and participate in a lot of things,” Longland said. “They might also discover new resources in their community.”

“We were very intentional about serving families by holding several events on one location on the same day,” Morenz said. “That makes it much easier for them, and makes it a little exciting. They can come for one event and stay for others.”

Some of the events this year:

• Covington Classical Academy will host a Marble Run, a STEM-oriented activity designed as a fun Olympic-style event modeled after the popular marble runs on YouTube.
• The Leaning Tower of Pasta event at Covington Partners will use engineering design to build the tallest spaghetti structure possible that will also handle the greatest load. Participants will gain firsthand experience of compression and tension forces.
• Basic face painting will teach participants the magic of face painting and then show parents how to paint their children’s faces and vice versa.
• A comic book contest at Kenton County Public Library, where children and teens will submit their own creations.
• Pages and Paws at Boone County Public Library, where children, grades K-5, will practice reading to therapy dogs.
• Let’s Gogh Explore Art! at Newport Public Library, where children will be read stories about the famous artist, Vincent Van Gogh, and then be inspired to create artwork. Families will be able to get together and create their own versions of one of Van Gogh’s most famous works, “Starry Night.”

Longland admires Remake Learning Days’ encouragement of hands-on activities. “There’s a big push for it, right now, and we have seen a lot of interest in hands-on events,” he said. “We have everything from dance and movement-based pieces to touch-a-truck events. There’s a wide gamut of activities going on, and we will have a lot of interest.”

Remake Learning Days also allows more people to learn about “all these cool little arts organizations or community organizations that serve a relatively small population,” Morenz said. “It’s really fun for the organizations to get a diverse audience, to grow it in unexpected ways.”

She added: “That’s the biggest thing I love about Remake Learning Days — them being able to pull together events for families and say, ‘Here are 100 things you can do for free in the community.'”

The event also gives organizations opportunities to work together.

Longland loves “the idea of connections, whether it’s a business, nonprofit or arts organization to reach out and make a new community connection so they can work together in the future. The introduction to all these resources that they may never had heard of yet or made the effort to seek out, here it is brought to them so they can learn from them.”

Remake Learning Days also shows residents what’s actually available in their regions, Longland and Morenz said.

“A lot of people in the Greater Cincinnati area aren’t aware of just how much there is, whether you are talking about social service resources or whether you are talking about the arts,” he said. “When you look at everything there is to offer, you see who these different organizations are.”

But, ultimately, Remake Learning Days is about bringing people together.

“It’s reinforcing some of the things people have been missing,” Longland said. “Social interactions, families getting together, and hands-on learning are the best ways to do that. If it’s hands-on, it’s always going to be better.”

More information about Remake Learning Days in Greater Cincinnati can be found here.