Local musician, author and sculptor Jill Trenholm offered a lesson that combined art, music and a touch of dance to the kindergarten students in Janice Goimarac’s class at West Sedona School as part of the city of Sedona’s Artist in the Classroom program on Friday, Jan. 26. It was the first of two performances that Trenholm gave for students that day.
“One of my earliest memories is going into a kindergarten class where there was a woman … she played the guitar,” Trenholm said. “That image of her with this guitar and she sang a song and I was hypnotized. I thought that was the amazing and amazing sound I have ever heard. That was the first time I heard a guitar.”
“[Trenholm] is dedicated to spreading positivity and kindness through her original kid’s music and children’s book series,” her Artist in the Classroom biography stated. “She feels it is important to instill these values in youngsters from an early age. Kids will enjoy songs like ‘The Gratitude Attitude’ and ‘Let’s Make Some Good Things Happen.’ She brings with her an oversized illustrated storybook so the kids can follow along. [Trenholm’s] talents are truly diverse. Her experience as a master sculptor and giftware designer along with her line of ‘In a Nutshell’ figurines have brought smiles to many collectors. She loves helping kids explore their creativity through sculpting, tailoring her ideas to different age groups to inspire young artists.”
The lesson opened with Trenholm reading her oversized children’s picture book “Jirina’s Journey,” before moving on to singing songs with the students. “Jirina’s Journey” is a music and storytelling adventure that teaches kids how to practice kindness.
“But it’s also a series of seven children’s books that leads into a novel for nine-to-12 year olds,” Trenholm said. “The protagonist is a little girl that wakes up in a storybook land, and she goes from book to book, meeting new characters and collecting items that help her when she enters the real world. And that’s when she goes into the novel, and in the novel, she takes these items. One is this special honey, [where] just one drop of this honey will make anybody kind. And she takes that to a rabbit who bakes these cookies, and they take on the same quality. For example, those things end up in her backpack when she enters the real world, and she has all these trials that she goes through. All along the way, she’s handing out cookies, thinking that the cookies themselves are making people be kind, but it’s the act of kindness itself that’s doing it.”
Trenholm also played three of her songs, “Practice Kindness,” “Let’s Make Some Good Things Happen” and “Gratitude Attitude.” Before the final song, the students also listed things that they were grateful for. Lilly Hunter named her cat, Oliver Isaac named his mother and father and Aurora Henry named her mother. Trenholm’s musical talents appear to have struck a chord with Hunter and Henry, who proceed to dance unprompted during the song’s first rendition before the group danced together during the encore.
“One of the things that’s pretty cool coming up with social-emotional learning is our counselor [Karen Hughes] is going to, in about two weeks, launch her kindness campaign,” West Sedona Principal Elizabeth Tavasci said. “She’ll go through all the classrooms and teach about kindness. Then over the course of the next few months, every week, she’ll drop off these little [paper] hearts in classrooms, and teachers and students can write down kind things that the students do. At the end of each week, she’ll draw one of those kindness hearts and we announce it on our intercom system during our morning announcements. That student comes down and gets a prize and a certificate [for] being very kind. Then we create this big tree with all the paper hearts on it to show the kindness that’s across the whole [school].”
“I think that it’s such an important thing at the elementary school level that we’re not only teaching our students about reading, writing, arithmetic … and STEM and those things are all valuable,” Tavasci continued. “But being a good member of your community involves kindness, that’s something that the kids all the way down to preschool can understand. So it’s something that we value here, and so we reinforce it in a lot of different ways.”
