Pull Up A Chair: Storytelling

01/21/2022

Our historian, Charles "Boomer" Winfrey being interviewed by WVLT's Allen Williams.

05/12/2020

http://farmvalues.net/general/introducing-farm-values/ This was a project from several years back that I thought kind of paralleled the Chair City Oral History Book Series that Chair City Community Workshop is doing. It was interesting to think about the connections between the "industrial" centers like Gardner and Athol and the rural agricultural towns around them.

Welcome to the website for "Farm Values: Civic Agriculture at the Crossroads," a project of Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust with humanities scholar Cathy Stanton. The project, which will take

05/08/2020

Our friends over at the Chair City Community Workshop are working on this year's GardnerMakes series. In doing some local research they noticed it's Mack Prototype's 100th Anniversary this year, so they're hoping to honor them as one of the featured Gardner Makes companies.

Is anyone connected to someone at Mack Prototype that can help us reach out to them to see if they'd be interested? Let us know here or email [email protected]

If you work for a company that makes things in Gardner and would like to be featured in the Gardner Makes series, please also reach out and we'll be happy to put you on the list! We are usually able to feature 2-3 companies each year.

04/24/2020

Here is a read aloud of Sequoyah: The Cherokee Man Who Gave His People Writing. Written and illustrated by James Rumford. Read aloud by Jonathan Dudley.

A read aloud of Sequoyah: the Cherokee man who gave his people writing. Written and illustrated by James Rumford. This read aloud is probably more geared tow...

04/02/2020

https://youtu.be/66FGGG57DU0 Since our classrooms are closed I wanted to record a couple of read alouds with children's books I have at home. I bought this book for my stepmom when she was a pre-school teacher and she gave it back to me when she finished teaching. I like this book because it seems to have been inspired by the work of Dr. Wangari Maathai.

Here is a link to a read aloud of Wangari's Trees of Peace a book I've read in the classroom in the past: https://youtu.be/GKyGijpTocc

And here is a link a blog post that with some really cool coloring pages, that includes one of Dr. Wangari! Usually we don't use coloring pages in the programs that I've worked in, BUT I learned through Handwriting Without Tears that "coloring inside the lines" can be helpful in developing the fine motor skill of making efficient strokes with a writing implement - so there you go! https://www.whatdowedoallday.com/womens-history-month-coloring-pages/

Since our classrooms are closed I wanted to record a couple of read alouds with children's books I have at home. I bought this book for my stepmom when she w...

03/12/2020

Tune in tonight at 8pm and 8:15pm tonight to see two episodes of Pull Up A Chair presents! https://videoplayer.telvue.com/player/yycCAZPb0NN3zj2o5qio-YFMNC43NjCG/playlists/3127/stream/378?autostart=true&showtabssearch=true&fullscreen=false

03/08/2020

The next Pull Up A Chair episode features the GardnerMakes project. Tune in on FATV.org to watch!

03/04/2020

https://www.nprorg/2020/02/12/805240795/becoming-america

When the United States of America was founded, it was only a union of a small number of states. By the beginning of the 20th century, the United States had become an empire; with states and territories and colonies that spanned the globe. As a result, the country began to not only reconsider its pla...

03/02/2020

I first heard this poem used as in exercise at an amazing little workshop I went to at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. The Chair City Community Workshop will be collecting "I am from" lines of poetry through the end of them month and will start letter press printing a Greater Gardner "I am from" poem in April! If you live in our grew up around Gardner please consider contributing a line or two!

Chair City - we need your help to make an epic letterpress printed crowdsourced poem about Greater Gardner!
Finish the sentence: “I am from…” in the comments below.
It’s okay if you grew up somewhere else! This area is special because people have come from all over the world. This is a public celebration of Chair City told though individual points of view. Try to keep it PG-13 and from the heart. All lines will be anonymous in the printed poem.