The Dream Flag Project

News Notes #5
updates for participant schools
3/18/05

In this News Notes:

• Dreams Are in the Air
• Notes on Decorating Dream Flags
• Putting Your Dream Flags On A Line
• Connecting the Dreams ON-LINE
• Takin' Them to the Street (or hallway)
• Survey Summary
• April 16th Announcement

Dreams Are in the Air
It's getting close now;  our students can tell exactly how many days left to spring break. (And they're often writing it on the board!) Dream Flags are taking shape all over and it's feels like they should be flying in the breeze.

In this short News Note, we'll review some tips on decorating Dream Flags, putting them on a line, and putting the poems on-line! We also have some exciting news about where our Dream Flags can go for exhibition after we've had our Dream Flag Celebration on April 16th.

A great note of thanks goes to all of the teachers who filled out and returned the 16-question survey we sent to the lead contact at each school. We've got a summary of those results in this News Note as well.

Hope your dreams are flying!

Yours,

--Jeff Harlan and Sandy Crow

Notes on Decorating Dream Flags
There are many ways to decorate Dream Flags. Some of them are noted on this site under Create. Here are a couple of tips.

1. Have kids work on scraps of sheets or cloth before doing the actual work on the Dream Flag. They need to see that it's not like paper.
2. If you can, show them samples of Dream Flags from this web site.
   -There are some examples in the Create section under Gallery. Go to Gallery Page, look at the ones there, and then use the link to Gallery Page from last year. Check out the ones from Berlin Community School, John Wister Elementary, The Springside School, and The Agnes Irwin School '03.
   -If you look at these, you can see how some of the best flags often use shapes and color to complement the poem (instead of trying to illustrate the poem, often a frustrating experience for students).
3. If you use paints, try using sponges. It can make a nice light pattern.
4. If you use watercolor on fabric, be sure to have some dry flat surfaces for the flags to dry on. Hanging them up right away may make them run.

Putting Your Dream Flags On A Line
Here again, there are a number of good ways to attach your Dream Flags to a line. They're outlined in the Connect section of this site. Here are some pointers and one important notice:

IMPORTANT NOTICE: LABEL FLAG
If your flags will be displayed at the Kimmel Center or will be part of the exhibition afterward, include a label flag to the left of all of your flags. This should be a flag with identification of your school, its location, and the grades of the participants. You can create more than one label flag if you like.

POINTERS:

1. When you buy rope, clothes line works well. Figure about 1 foot per flag.
2. A good distance between the flags is 2-3 inches. It allows enough for each to bee seen individually and economizes on space.
3. If you sew, the easiest way is to go through the cloth over the TOP of the rope, around it, then through the cloth again. That way you never have to sew through the rope (very hard on fingers), and it's still secure.
4. If you have more than twenty flags, using several pieces of rope is easier. When the flag lines get bigger than 20 feet (the approximate size for 20 flags), then they're hard to manage and transport.
5. Leave at least a foot of rope at each end of your flag line so you can easily tie it to another one.

To see our inspiration for this presentation method, check out these great pictures of Nepalese prayer flags!

Connecting the Dreams ON-LINE
It would be fabulous for all of us to be able to see the flags and students who are making them. If you can take a digital picture of your group(s) and their flags; please email it to us, and we'll post it. If you can, send your photos before April 3rd, but any time is OK.

A new part of our project this year is to post as many poems as possible on our site so that students can read and respond to the work of other Dream Flag poets. This is an important step in creating not just "parallel play" but real interaction between our project's participants.

Here's what to remember:

1. Please list the author's first name and last initial.  We don't publish student last names on the site.
2. Try to get all poems to me by March 23. That is next week. We'll try to get everything up by the end of that week. If you can't get it in by the 23rd, send it whenever you can, and we'll put it up.
3. Be sure to include the name of your school and the grade(s) of the students who wrote the poems.
4. You don't need to send all of the poems. Samples would be fine--just 10 or so from each school would be great.
5. It's best to email a Word document attachment with the poems on it. One class per document is about right. (Please don't send one document for each student or it will take forever to post them.)
6. Please send Microsoft Word documents if you can. We can deal with all kinds of formats, but that's the easiest.
7. If you'd like to have responses to your students' poems (a wonderful idea), then please provide a postal and/or email address where the responses should be sent. Email should only be to a teacher, not to a student. We can post a link that will send the email to you, the teacher, but will not reveal your email address to the person sending or to anyone else.

Takin' Them to the Street (or hallway)
We've got some great news on where the Dream Flags can be exhibited after the April 16th event. Here's what's up:

St. Christopher's Hospital:  Located in North Philadelphia, St. Christopher's Hospital for Children has told us they would love to have Dream Flags exhibited there. The Dream Flags will be seen by patients, doctors, and visitors every day. The hospital staff is very excited to have the messages of hope and the diversity of color in their halls.

Bryn Mawr Hospital:  With hundreds patients in and out every day, the main lobby and post-surgery waiting room (for families) at the Bryn Mawr Hospital will be places where dream poems and art will be an uplifting sight for people who are very often in a stressful time.

There are a few other locations that are "up in the air," but we will let you know as soon as we can.

Survey Summary
We sent a survey to each  Dream Flag Project school to find out how many of us there really are and what we'll be doing. Out of the 35 registered groups, 26 responded. Here's what we know so far.

• Groups Participating in The Dream Flag Project: 33 (List)
• Student Participants: 2,700+
• Grade Levels of Participants: K-10
• Dream Flag Celebrations In School: 20+
• Schools Participating in the 2005 Regional Dream Flag Celebration April 16th at Philadelphia's Kimmel Center: 24+ (List)
  (Some are participating remotely by sending poems and author pictures.
• Dream Flags at April 16th Event: 1,455+
• Dream Flags Going on Exhibition After April 16th Event: 1,131+

April 16th Announcement
If you are in driving distance of Philadelphia, you may want to put out some kind of announcement to let your school community know about the Regional Dream Flag Celebration on March 16th at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. It's a free event and open to the public. Here's an announcement we made which you could use or modify.   

Web Page ---   Word Document