Another story today about the experiences of one of our presenters, and the power of school assemblies to impact the lives of children!

Tom Barry is a great guy and presents two of our programs, The Earth Dome and The Sky Dome Planetarium. He is based on Long Island, and tours in New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania. Our customers love this guy, and I hope you will see why.

This is from a letter Tom sent to me recently. The Italics are mine.

 “A few years back I was teaching the Sky Dome program at an elementary school (like I do) and there was a group of autistic children there for one of the programs.  They were a younger group of kids, probably first to third graders.  Now, I am by no means an expert in classification of students but I would have to say that the children's autism was pretty profound--every ten or fifteen seconds a timer each aide had would go off and if the child had sat quietly in that amount of time, they were given a small piece of potato chip or snack--so, it was fairly severe.  Obviously, with students with special needs at a program a certain amount of noise is not only tolerated, but expected and yet, with this group of autistic kids, there was hardly any noise at all (except for those timers).  

We were going through the planets for the "solar-system-tour" part of the program and we were at the point where the discussion turned to Saturn's rings.  I always like to make a little joke about how difficult the names of the rings are to remember, so I make a big production of saying each ring's name. . .Ring A, Ring B, Ring C, Ring D--now here's where it gets tricky--Ring E, Ring F and. . .oh, what was that next ring?  Normally, children will laugh as I struggle to remember the next letter of the alphabet, but in this case, one of the children popped right up and said, "G!"  

Many times children will call out the next letter in the sequence of rings so that in itself is no big deal however, the student who supplied this particular answer had apparently never before answered a question using words!  

It was the first time he had spoken an answer to a question in his life!

Naturally, there was a whole lot of noise in the dome after that, but not from the students; nope, this noise was from the teachers and the aides as they all were cheering and crying for this student who had apparently just made a huge leap.  

We can never underestimate the power or the impact we have not only on the students we teach, but on those in their lives as well--I guarantee that that evening, the child's parents shed a few tears of joy as well.”

I could not have said it better myself, Tom! This is the kind of story that we love to hear. It really reinforces how important school assemblies can be.

Those of you that live in New York, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, and who are looking for ideas for school assembly programs, might want to check whether or not Tom has any dates available in your area. Oh, and for the younger females, I am told Tom is considered quite “hot”, but relax, ladies, as this young man is happily engaged!

Geoff Beauchamp is the Regional Manager of Mobile Ed Productions where "Education Through Entertainment" has been the guiding principal since 1979. Mobile Ed Productions produces and markets quality educational school assembly programs in the fields of science, history, writing, astronomy, natural science, mathematics, character issues and a variety of other curriculum based areas. In addition, Mr. Beauchamp is a professional actor with 30 years of experience in film, television and on stage. He created and still performs occasionally in Mobile Ed's THE LIVING LINCOLN