Over 5,000 elementary students from across the Central Valley flocked to Fresno State for the 57th annual Peach Blossom Festival on Thursday.
The festival is an oral interpretation poetry fest for elementary school children, a two-day event organized by the department of communication. Students paired written literature with oral interpretation using hand motions and expressions to perform in theatres and classrooms across all over campus in front of judges and audiences.
The festival began fifty years ago as a joint effort between the speech communication and theater arts department. It was created to increase awareness among young people about the importance of reading literature aloud and to teach them about interpretation and performance.
The festival has grown tremendously and attracts schools from as far north as Livingston and as far south as Delano.
Marcie Lierly, the director of the Peach Blossom Festival, said the event provides a chance for younger students to visit campus and introduces literature to the community.
“We want to instill love for poetry, not only in the written form, but also in the oral form,” Lierly said.
This year, over 148 schools participated in the festival with over 1000 performances at the two-day event. Some schools have been attending for as many as 14 years.
Fresno State volunteers and professors are the judges of the performances. The elementary students recite poems in alone in pairs or in small or large groups. Judges look for confidence, fluidity, memorization of lines along with hand motions, presentation quality and other techniques that make the poem more interesting.
Brittany Weigant, one of the poetry judges of the festival, said that this event was beneficial to younger students in learning public speaking skills.
“I think it’s an amazing opportunity for students to learn how to perform in front of people and have fun at the same time,” Weigant said.
Being a part of the Peach Blossom Festival might be a new experience to some, but for others it is a tradition.
Rosie Valdez, a teacher from the Aynesworth Elementary School, said that the school has been participating in the festival for almost 14 years, and they hope to continue for years to come.
“This is a very exciting event for our students, and we really hope to inspire them to build on their oral language skills and presentation abilities,” Valdez said. “I think it’s a great experience for the students to learn more about poetry while visiting the campus.”