Five teams of professional dancers from Ballet Quad Cities will spend five days delivering interactive educational outreach programs to 1,200 first-grade students in 17 Davenport schools. The outreach includes meeting professional dancers and learning about their career choice and how they spend their work day; the students then take a mini dance class and learn choreography from the ballet The Ugly Duckling. Fourteen first-grade students from Lincoln Academy were also chosen to perform in The Ugly Duckling, which was performed for the public February 16 and 17. A special school matinée for the Davenport schools will be performed at 12:30 p.m. on March 6 at the Capitol Theatre.
The Moline Public Library welcomes the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center on Monday, March 10, at 11 a.m. This is a free service that provides audio books and magazines to people of all ages who cannot read standard print due to visual or physical impairments. The program features more than 72,000 audio-book titles, over 100 magazine titles, playback equipment, Braille materials, and PlayAway digital audio books. For more information, contact the Moline Public Library at (309) 736-5737.
The Figge Art Museum will offer free admission from 12:30 to 3 p.m. on March 1 for families to experience Birds of America: John James Audubon, which displays 40 chromolithograph prints selected from the Charles Deere Collection at Butterworth Center. The exhibit runs through May 11. Audubon combined his love of nature with his artistic talent to produce some of the most beautiful and lifelike depictions of birds ever created. Activities start at 1 p.m. For more information, visit (http://www.figgeartmuseum.org). Furthermore, the Butterworth Trust is offering up to $100 in reimbursements to area schools for each bus that visits the museum. To participate, contact Gretchen Small at (309) 765-7971 or (gsmall@butterworthcenter.com). Funds are limited. School visits to the Figge Art Museum must be arranged by contacting Heather at (563) 326-7804 extension 2045 or (haaronson@figgeartmuseum.org). Museum admission fees for school groups are $3 per student, or $5 per student with an art project. Visits to the Figge can include a movie on Audubon for students in grades five through 12.
Jim Richardson was presented with the Sheldon Sitrick Memorial Leadership Award at the Bettendorf Chamber Annual Meeting Luncheon on Tuesday, February 19. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the Bettendorf Chamber of Commerce, and it recognizes extraordinary leadership of the chamber and in the community. The honor was last awarded in 2002.
A nine-session series of classes for people who have been diagnosed with mental illness will be offered by NAMI Scott County beginning in March. The "Peer to Peer Recovery Education Course" will meet every Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. from March 6 to May 1 in an education room at Pavilion 2 of Genesis West, off Marquette Street near Central Park Avenue in Davenport. The class includes information for participants about how to prevent relapse, how to improve quality of life, skills to help cope with symptoms, exercises to focus and calm thinking, skills for working with providers and the general public, and ways to protect their interests when they have a relapse. For more information or to register for the class, contact Alice Thiemann at (563) 323-7453, Janet Darmour-Paul at (563) 391-5723, or Jon Grate at (563) 326-6010.
Trinity Regional Health System's pastoral-care department will offer a "Befriender" training course on Tuesday afternoons from 1 to 4 p.m. March 4 through May 6. The training course will cover programs at all of Trinity's Quad Cities campuses. Classes will be held at First Lutheran Church, 1230 Fifth Avenue in Moline. Befrienders are volunteers who provide a listening ear to those patients who would like a pastoral-care visitor. They also give patients information on spiritual-care services and check church-affiliation information. For more information, call Chaplain Lynn Batcher at (309) 779-2991 or the pastoral-care office at (309) 779-2989.
House Study Bill 679, which could bring innovative odor-reduction research from the labs of Iowa State University to Iowa livestock farms, has been praised by Iowa Farm Bureau members. The odor-mitigation bill brings together the Iowa Department of Agriculture & Land Stewardship, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, and Iowa State University odor researchers to determine what methods work best and are most cost-effective in reducing odor on Iowa's hog, poultry, and cattle farms. It is anticipated that House Study Bill 679 will be debated in the House Agriculture committee, and a companion bill is expected to be introduced in the Senate.
