Family Area Activities and Stage
Sponsored by Pohanka Automotive Group
with additional funding Provided by the Maryland Heritage Area Authority
This special interactive area features hands-on crafts, quiet games and active games, and other creative learning activities for young audiences and their families. The Family Stage, located within the Family Area, features a variety of performances, including storytelling, puppetry, and interactive music and dance.
Featured Performances
A variety of family performances, including puppetry, storytelling, and interactive music and dance workshops—all designed to be enjoyed by both the young and the young-at-heart.
Sounds of Korea
Dressed in exquisite traditional attire, Sounds of Korea presents powerful ritual drumming, lush music, and expressive dances that offer a window into the heart of Korean culture.
Greenbelt S.I.T.Y. Stars
Greenbelt S.I.T.Y. Stars is a champion precision jump rope team with flashy moves, agility, speed, style, and a positive message that welcomes kids to get involved.
Jeghetto
Master puppeteer Jeghetto handcrafts astonishing, 21st-century puppets from recycled materials that kids of all ages will want to meet: breakdancing androids, dinosaurs, dreadlocked cellists, and a cast of others.
The Red Trouser Show
The Red Trouser Show is a dynamic street circus duo that combines acrobatics with daring feats and nonstop laughs, and performs a breathtaking finale ending high in the air, all with a little help from audience members.
Nukariik
Nukariik are two friends who perform Inuit throat singing, a rarely heard traditional vocal game from the Arctic regions. The singers blend their breath and voiced sounds to create playful, rhythmic melodies and imitations of sounds in nature.
Dancing On Air Crew
The b-boying Dancing On Air Crew executes gravity-defying head spins, twirling windmills, and rapid-fire footwork that are the hallmarks of this exciting hip hop dance style.
The Chankas of Perú
The Chankas of Perú carry on the danza de las tijeras (scissors dance), an ancient, highly acrobatic indigenous ritual dance from the southern Andes of Peru.
FAMILY ACTIVITIES AREA
The Family Activities Area features interactive activities, hands-on crafts, parades, games—both active and quiet—and other creative learning opportunities.
Make and Take Activites
- Build a rainstick, an ancient percussion instrument that makes a sound like falling rain, and then decorate it with your own art work.
- Make your own harmonica in a few simple steps out of popsicle sticks, straws and rubber bands.
- Assemble your own colonial “whirligig” toy with buttons and string.
- Pick your favorite color of yarn and make a traditional yarn doll.
- Carve a soap decoy using family-safe utensils – the perfect introduction to a deep Delmarva tradition.
- Gyotaku (Fish Printing) is a traditional method used by Japanese fishermen to record their catches; make your own fish print using rubber fish replicas.
- Make paper quilt squares that help “stitch together” the things that make us Maryland.
All-Hands Community Art Project
Help to create a collaborative art work that will be displayed year-round in the new Pemberton Park Community Garden.
Traditional Games
Discover what kids did for fun before videogames! Learn how to play marbles, and test your “shooting” abilities; the shooter with the most marbles at the end wins. Watch a demonstration of clay marbles and see how the games was played in the 19th century. Play human foosball – the life-sized remake of the table game version invented in the early 1900s. Kids and adults form two teams and compete in a friendly, fun match. Try your hand at cornhole, a bean-bag tossing game that has been popular for over 100 years.
All About Bees
Learn all about bees and other pollinators. See the bees in action in a self-contained hive. Make butterflies with colorful wings out of coffee filters, a paper straw, and pipe cleaners. Did you know that butterflies can taste with their feet? Which flowers do butterflies, bees and hummingbirds like best? Learn their secrets, and then match the pollinators with their favorite flowers using cutouts on a stand-up board. Visit the pollinator garden with flowers for all the pollinators, plus the plants caterpillars need to eat. Find out how to attract pollinators to your own back yard!
Story Time and Waggle Dance (pre-school)
An interactive story that highlights Salisbury as a National Bee City. Make and sing songs and learn the bee “waggle dance.”
The Underground Railroad
Earn your official National Park Service Junior Ranger badge by completing an activity booklet about the Underground Railroad (for all ages). Get “sworn in” at special pledge ceremonies on the Family Stage.
Join in hands-on activities focused on Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad with historian Tony Cohen. A fourth-generation descendant of a runaway slave, Cohen is a noted explorer of the American slavery experience who retraced the Underground Railroad by foot in an epic, two-month-long journey, and had himself shipped inside a wooden crate like Virginia fugitive Henry “Box” Brown. Try your hand at the chores that Harriet and other children had to perform on a 19th-century Eastern Shore plantation. Gain a tactile understanding of the skills and knowledge she acquired during slavery that helped her succeed in her heroic endeavors.
Animal Ambassadors
Meet the animal ambassadors from the Salisbury Zoo when they to visit (1:30 – 3:30 p.m. daily).
Music and Dance
- Learn how to beatbox from Shodekeh.
- Pick up some cool blues dance moves from Junious Brickhouse.
- Try some awesome Jewish stunts and dances with Steve Weintraub.
Thanks to our Family Area Partners:
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park and State Park; National Park Service; HISTORIO; Salisbury Art Space; Salisbury Zoo; Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art, Salisbury University; University of Maryland Extension; Wicomico County Recreation, Parks and Tourism; Wicomico Public Libraries.
