BERLIN – The point of encouraging kids to do art has as much to do with teaching them about traditional approaches, forms and the like as it has to do with helping them get comfortable with channeling a little inspiration into original work.

Last weekend’s Berlin Intermediate School’s 11th Annual Art Fest event, themed Kaleidoscope of Color for 2011, was attended by children from schools all over the county getting creative in all aspects of the arts.

BIS fifth-grader, Evan Marlowe came primarily to participate in the drum circle. Run throughout the year as an after school group by school nurse Doris Ludicke the drum circle is not only an after school group, but kind of club that whets kids’ appetites for self expression. While he was waiting for other kids to join for another round of drumming Marlowe got bored and decided to invent a new instrument tentatively called the bottle bell.

Since there was soda provided, Marlowe had no trouble finding three two-liter soda bottles to band together with duct tape into an cowbell-like instrument. Satisfied by the potential, he sought out one of the thicker paper towel rolls, applied some additional duct tape and created a multi-sonic instrument. He experimented with the different tones the three bottles produced based both upon their shape and the sector he struck.

For instance, one of the Sprite bottles Marlowe chose had a sharper cone that rose from the base of the bottle, supplanting the neck and ending at the spout. He tested each inch of that bottle as he had the others so he was able to better dictate the kind of sound each bottle produced.

Before too long Ludicke convinced him and some of the other kids who’d begun to wanter into the room to take their places at the drums as the drumming drew more potential participants to see what all the fuss was about.

This kind of scene was common throughout the 15 or so tables the members of the BIS art department had established and staffed throughout the auditorium. Local screen-painter and regular art volunteer at BIS John Iampieri helped kids turn their small drawings into buttons at one station. Iampieri’s only disappointment on the day was that his daughter, who had also planned to help, took ill at the last minute and couldn’t make it.

The button-maker was one of the more popular tables because the kids not only had the opportunity to make their own buttons by having their drawings stamped into wearable pin buttons, but since they were not guided by a theme they were able to produce either whatever they were most comfortable drawing or whichever vision they felt was worth reproducing regardless of the actual skill they could muster in its creation. The button table, like the rest of the exhibits, as more about the play that makes art than the skill.

In the front lobby, where kids took turns coloring the school’s front windows into stained glass replicas BIS art teacher and event co-coordinator Kathi Stevens talked about how the event has become an expected part of area students’ extra-curricular lives well after they leave BIS.

“We have a lot of volunteers from the community as well as students from the high school looking to increase their service hours,” she said.

Stevens and fellow art teacher Natalee Palmer plan the event each year with the help, not only of the rest of the art department but from other teachers who volunteer to make the event successful every year.

“We choose the theme based on things we know we can do a lot with,” she said indicating the range of different artistic endeavors available.

One of the Steven Decatur High School volunteers, freshman Slater Morton helped students put actual kaleidoscopes together. The table was surrounded by kids testing out the view through their newly-made ‘scopes and beginning to try filling them with light-catching material that would make the end product both worth keeping and using. The scene was the same at each of the other tables as well with parents, teachers, and volunteers prodding kids to get creative and see where it takes them.