FARMINGTON – The Foothills Arts Center will offer two new children’s programs in July: Art and Story-Theater Camp and Violin Adventures. Both offer learning in a supportive environment. There are scholarships available for families who cannot afford the program fees.

Violin Adventures is a group violin lesson program founded and taught by violinist Jeanne Feder of Farmington. The program of four weekly 45-minute lessons is for beginning violin students age 4 to 6. Lesson times and days will be determined by Feder and the students’ families.

Children will learn note recognition as they develop right- and left-hand violin technique in a relaxed and fun interactive group setting. Each class will have four to five beginning violinists.

Small-size violins are available for rental from Tom Bailey of Sirius Music. The lessons will be held at the Foothills Arts Center on Pleasant Street in downtown Farmington.

The Art and Story-Theater Camp, for students now in grades one through three, will be held at Academy Hill School in Wilton from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. Monday to Friday, July 17 through 21.

Children will use their imaginations and express their own creativity as they do art work and read and act out stories about orange cats, gargoyles, flying pigs and flamingos. The camp instructor, Betsey Bailey of Brunswick, promises a large dose of humor.

Feder taught weekly violin lessons to 75 students at the Brooklyn (New York) Conservatory of Music from 1985-1999, before moving to Farmington. In addition to teaching her program, she gives private violin lessons to Western Maine area students. Her specialty is teaching young children.

Bailey began teaching in 1968 as a high school art teacher and has been teaching kindergarten through grade five art in Harpswell for the past 20 years. Bailey was a member of a team recently selected to teach in the Portland Museum of Art “Look at ME!” art and literacy program. She has taught at Foothills Summer Arts (for fourth to 12th graders) for several years.

For more information, contact Anne Geller at the Foothills Arts Center, 778-0448 or info@foothillsarts.org.

The center is a community arts organization that brings together children and adults, artists and audiences, to share the arts in an atmosphere that encourages learning, exploration, and collaboration. Information on other Foothills programs can be found at foothillsarts.org.