Wildwood Kite Festival
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Phantom Star Kite |
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Child with train of star kites |
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Ronda Brewer with Student |
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Group of Happy Kitefliers |
The Drachen Foundation receives many invitations to participate in kite festivals; sadly, we are able to participate in only a handful of these events. With the Foundation’s mandate to work within an educational area, a partnership must be developed with the festival’s organizers with this in mind.
This year, the organizers of Wildwoods International Kite Festival in Wildwood, New Jersey, proposed an educational format to work with both spectators of the festival and with teachers and students in neighboring schools.
This year, Drachen Foundation board members selected to sponsor a kite program at the festival with Ronda Brewer and Lindsey Johnson of Oregon. Over the past five years, these two have focused on an innovative use of Tyvek® kit kits, allowing both beginners and experts to gain experience in kite making. Teaching a star variation of their 4’ Tyvek® No-sew Rokkaku Kite kit, Brewer and Johnson led a kite making workshop using their kite kit as well as workshops focusing on how to design and build your own kite. During these sessions, participants included families, teachers, and a few kite fliers that had never built a kite before.
“We were really impressed with the number of families that participated in the Phantom Star Kite workshops,” comments Brewer, “We took a lot of pictures of happy kite builders and their new creations.”