Cole Arts Camp is a safe space for students to freely express and explore their ideas, imaginations, and emotions through a range of art mediums. Students rotate between activities from hip-hop creative dance, percussive drumming, puppeteering, storytelling, visual arts, and more.

Andre’s dance classes are full of exciting songs familiar and new giving them a wide palette of percussive and melodic music to dance to. Group games and choreography are collaborative with time to explore their individual inclinations and creative ideas. Andre leads students in dance and drum circles were they are able to be part of the group and confidently express individually.

Doug has been perfecting the art of storytelling to children for over 25 years. He has a wide variety of stories in his repertoire, and can tailor an assembly for a particular group of kids. Doug’s stories include comedy, folk and fairy tales, and myths and legends from around the world. Comic stories from his childhood and his son Andre’s are particular favorites of children, as are his original fantasy stories and fairy tales.

He has an especially rich collection of tales from ancient India, China and Norse mythology that tie in nicely with many schools’ social studies curriculum. Doug is a highly accomplished harmonica player, and often integrates some music into his assemblies

Since the beginning of my teaching career, I saw the power of stories to engage, transform, educate and delight. Rarely a day went by in my classroom when I wasn’t spinning some kind of tale. If I forgot, or got too busy, the kids would plead with me “How about a story Mr C.-pleeease!”

All students work up to a final performance on the last day performed for families and friends.