What is the Letter to My Father Workshop?
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The Letter to My Father Workshop is an interactive workshop that gently leads participants to discover how their relationship, or lack of relationship, with their fathers influences the choices they make in their lives. This workshop uses conversation, music, artistic projects, worksheets, Father Cards, and letter writing (according to length of the workshop) to explore the unique, individual experience of each participants’ father/child relationship.
LETTER TO MY FATHER WORKSHOPS
Workshop Purpose
This workshop encourages participants to look inward, examine their actions and behaviors, to better understanding their decisions and choices.
Letter to My Father encourages participants to see that change may not only be needed, but possible. The Letter to My Father workbook pages, conversations, and artistic projects, kindle emotional responses that influence how children/adults think about themselves, and their place in society. They come to understand that when they write a letter to their father, they are really writing a letter to themselves. Armed with a more confident vision of what the world should look and feel like, participants begin to question and confront behaviors that keep them psychologically exhausted.
Workshop Activities
Workshop activities are based on the length of the workshop. An hour workshop would mainly be discussion, while a multi-day workshop would include discussions, workbook pages, artistic activities, and writing. For the classroom see the Letter to My Father Curriculum for Grades 3-12.
The Father Cards will be used in each workshop.
What is the Letter to My Father Educational Curriculum?
The Letter to My Father Educational Curriculum, covering students from 3rd to 12th grades, includes projects which cover six skill areas: research, reading, creative writing, media arts, group dynamics and creative thinking. It is not necessary to incorporate each area into the lesson plan, and teachers will have freedom and flexibility in deciding to decide which of these areas are appropriate for their classrooms and grade levels. Each teacher will be given workbooks for each student participating in the curriculum along with other curriculum supplies, including books chosen for the curriculum and arts materials.
FATHER CARDS
One of the hardest things to talk about is our relationship with our father. Open a deck of Father Cards and you open a world of candid discussion and socialization. The discussion about the Father/Child Relationship suddenly become safe and manageable.
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Father Cards are the only deck of cards created to generate sincere, safe conversations about the father/child connection.
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Father Cards can be used by children, teenagers, adults, parents, book clubs, church groups, women and men groups, fathers who want to create a pathway to communicating with their children, and in many other situations. But they also allow singular examination of the parental relationship and its effects on our individual journeys.
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Father Cards work great in workshops, classrooms, and therapeutic situations. Family gatherings can become more valuable, girls’ “nights in” takes on a new meaning, and the men’s den suddenly evolves into a place of reflection and conversation.
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There are only 2 rules—answer only the card you pick and answer as honestly as you can. Just shuffle the deck and begin the conversation. There is new discovery in every card.
Ages 5-and up.
About Workshop Leader
Tina Smith-Brown
Tina Smith-Brown is a Graduate of the University of Denver’s Master of Fine Art Program, Temple University’s Journalism Program, and the Art Institute’s Multimedia and Web Design Program. A lover and supporter of community art, she has served on several non-profit boards. She released her independently published fiction novel, Fish and Grits, in 2010. She is a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Fellowship for non-fiction and was granted two Leeway Foundation Art and Change Awards.
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Tina has held her Letter to My Father Workshops at numerous places, including Art Sanctuary’s City Hall Brown Bag Series, Art Sanctuary North Star Program, The Girls to Women Conference held by White Dove Performing Arts Academy, Arise Academy Charter School, the Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd,
Crenshaw High School, in Los Angeles, CA, and has taken her workshop to numerous locations as a consultant with the Mighty Writers program.
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