'The King's Only Daughter'

'The King's Only Daughter':

A thrilling energy blended with traditional storytelling is the heart of every performance by Oakland's Diamano Coura West African Dance Company. Colorful, ebullient and rich with infectious rhythms, Diamano Coura's latest show promises to be no exception as the company presents the U.S. debut of Nimely Napla's 'The King's Only Daughter.

In many West African communities, dance, music and theater blend not just with each other but also with daily life - an idea reflected in "The King's Only Daughter," which, Napla says, "is a dance drama, with music, song, everything together."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/26/NS5U1ANBFA.DTL#ixzz0YBRDrdRA

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Tree Frog Treks at Paxton Gate: Get curious

Tree Frog Treks at Paxton Gate: Get curious: "Piquing natural curiosity is right there in the name of Paxton Gate's Curiosities for Kids, a magic toy shop tucked away on San Francisco's Valencia Street, between 18th and 19th streets. Amid twisted branches and vines and whimsical mounted stuffed animal heads, science kits, games, knitted octopuses, giant eyeballs and other provoking tchotchkes share the shelves with natural specimens."

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Saturday stargazing at Lawrence Hall of Science

Saturday stargazing at Lawrence Hall of Science: "It's been 400 years since Galileo first pointed his telescope to the sky to look at the stars, and what better way to celebrate this International Year of Astronomy than by having a look at Jupiter, the planet that so mesmerized the great Italian astronomer.

The hills above UC Berkeley offer a fine vantage point for stargazing, and every first and third Saturday of the month, the Lawrence Hall of Science turns down the lights on the main plaza and sets up telescopes so astronomers amateur or professional can enjoy the heavenly show - a terrific opportunity to introduce kids to navigating the night sky and basic constellations."

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'HallowScreen': Classic spooky Disney cartoons

'HallowScreen': Classic spooky Disney cartoons: "We're looking for the new Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio, and after driving around the Main Post, we spot a pleasant-looking guy waving at us from the porch of a red brick building, indistinguishable from the other red brick buildings next to it, save for the discreet white sign."

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96 Hours Family: Petaluma Pumpkin patches

In the pristine world of Facebook's Farmville, nothing is ever dusty, there's no smell of manure and the pumpkins only take eight hours to grow. With Halloween fast approaching, though, the time is ripe to detach from the computers and take the kids out to pick pumpkins for real.

This weekend, you don't have to brave traffic jams headed to Half Moon Bay's Art & Pumpkin Festival to get good jack-o'-lantern material. Consider, instead, heading to some of the working farms of Petaluma, like Peterson's Farm or Andersen's Organic Vegetable Stand and Pumpkin Patch.

Read more at the SF Chronicle website.

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96 Hours: The Blessing of the Animals

Four legs, two legs, Episcopalian, agnostic, furry, feathered or scaled - everyone is welcome at Grace Cathedral's blessing of the animals, an annual celebration of the guy for whom San Francisco is named, St. Francis of Assisi.

Although this favorite traditional ceremony traces back to the fourth century, when St. Anthony of the Desert allowed animals into the church to be blessed - most churches now celebrate the event on Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis, well-known to Christians for his love of animals. After naming him the patron saint of ecology in 1979, Pope John Paul II wrote that he hoped St. Francis' example would, "help us to keep ever alive a sense of 'fraternity' with all those good and beautiful things which Almighty God has created. And may he remind us of our serious obligation to respect and watch over them with care, in light of that greater and higher fraternity that exists within the human family."

Read more at the SF Chronicle website.

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Day of the Dead workshops

Although the Day of the Dead is not until Nov. 1, the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts is already working on elaborate decorations and altars that mark the celebrations of the colorful Mexican holiday. Joining forces with the San Francisco Symphony, which continues an annual tradition of a family concert on the Day of the Dead, the Mission Cultural Center is playing host to a series of hands-on workshops over the next few weeks that give kids the chance to work on large-scale community art projects, which will be exhibited in the lobby of Davies Symphony Hall in the weeks leading up to the holiday.

One of the three workshops has kids and their parents making giant animal sculptures inspired by the creatures that appear in Camille Saint-Saëns' "The Carnival of the Animals," which will also be on the program for the Nov 1. concert at Davies Symphony Hall. Workshop instructor Colette Crutcher, a local artist whose own exuberant mosaic mural "Tonantsin Renace" graces a wall at 16th and Sanchez streets, already has a menagerie going strong in the Mission Cultural Center studios.

Read more at the SF Chronicle site.

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Scottish Highland Gathering and Games

Men tossing tree trunks, hurling 16-pound hammers, sheepdogs a-leaping, Scottish dancers dancing, bagpipers piping, drummers drumming - no, it's not the 12 days of Christmas, it's the two days of the 144th Scottish Highland Gathering and Games, which takes place this Labor Day weekend at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton.

"There is literally going to be something for everyone," says Floyd Busby, spokesman for the Caledonian Club of San Francisco, which has organized this annual event since 1866.

Read more at the SF Chronicle site.

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96 Hours: Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble

The strains of Latin jazz will heat up the city streets when the Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble plays this Sunday in Union Square as part of the ongoing free Jewels in the Square performances. Far from a kiddie show, this group of about 15 young musicians, who range in age from 10 to 18 years old, display a serious professionalism.

Founded in 2001 by Bay Area bandleader and San Francisco State University faculty member John Calloway along with Arturo Riera and Sylvia Ramirez, the ensemble boasts a resume that any professional would envy, including opening for jazz greats such as the Cuban bassist Israel "Cachao" López, and jamming with the likes of noted pianist Chuchito Valdés.

"It's quite an opportunity for a student musician," Ramirez says. "We are really unique - we've been around since 2001 and have never charged the students to participate. We recruit from all over the community, especially public schools, where kids may have a lot of natural talent and some training, but they might never have had access to private instruction in music."

Read more at the SF Chronicle website.

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96 Hours Family: Take Flight for Kids

For a kid who can't walk, how about the opportunity to fly?

The Take Flight for Kids festival, which takes off Saturday at the Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose, aims to open up new worlds for kids with special needs, who are physically or cognitively challenged or from at-risk groups, by giving them a chance to experience flying - not just by riding in a plane or helicopter but also by taking the controls of the plane.

Sponsored by the Valley Medical Center Foundation Project and the San Jose Experimental Aircraft Association Chapter 62, the flights are the experience of a lifetime, says organizer Dean McCully, and for many of the 200 or so lucky kids - who go up with their families - it might be the first time they've ever been in a plane.

"We put the kids in the co-pilot seat and when the pilot says, 'OK, the plane is yours,' they take over," McCully explains, admitting that the pilot, of course, doesn't take his or her hands off the main controls. But for a few minutes, the kids are able to direct the plane and feel what it's like to command the craft.

Read more at the SF Chronicle website.

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96 Hours Family: Grind for the Green's Eco-music conference

With President Obama pushing to create millions of new "green-collar" jobs, being eco-conscious might not just be a good idea, it may become a lucrative one as well. But buying organic, starting your own garden and living the sustainable life can be expensive, and for many people, it might feel as though the green movement is a nice but unavailable crusade that has all but passed them by.

"While certain parts of the Bay Area are very eco-conscious, for people in some parts of the city, like Bayview-Hunters Point, they just don't have access to some of the resources, the technology or information that would allow them to live in an ecologically conscious, self-sustaining way," says Ambessa Cantave, who with wife Zakiya Harris founded Grind for the Green in 2007, an organization dedicated to bringing ideas on how young people can shape a green future for themselves and practical resources for sustainable living to underserved communities.

Read more in the SF Chronicle site.

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96 Hours Family: Reflections at the Exploratorium

Kids tend to rush around the Exploratorium, but the young boy whizzing around me stops short with an impressed "Whoa!" He stares at the life-size upside-down image of himself that has appeared in front of a giant spherical mirror and experimentally waves his hand at himself, mesmerized by how real his doppelganger appears.

Once used by NASA for a flight simulator, the enormous mirror comes to the Exploratorium via the Chabot Space and Science Center, and it greets - and entrances - visitors to the museum's latest exhibition, "Reflections."

Read more at the SF Chronicle site.

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96 Hours: Home Depot's Kids Workshops: safety, skill

On Saturday morning, you might notice a brigade of shorter-than-usual do-it-yourselfers heading through the aisles of Home Depot. Follow the sound of chattering voices and pounding hammers and you'll find dozens of youngsters sitting on upturned buckets and making projects at the Home Depot's Kids Workshops.

Read more at SFChronicle.com

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96 Hours: San Ramon's Art and Wind Festival

Sled kites, diamond kites, delta kites - whatever your favorite style might be, for a high-flying time, consider dusting off your old kite and taking it out for a spin with the kids at the San Ramon Art and Wind Festival, which takes place on Sunday and Monday in San Ramon Central Park.

In addition to the regular arts, crafts and food booths, rock-climbing wall, face painting and inflatable bouncy houses that make any outdoor festival fun, kids can learn all about the ways of the wind in free kite-making workshops (10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and 1:30-4 p.m.) in the community center, where they can also make wind socks, wind bonnets and wind wands.

Read more at the San Francisco Chronicle site.

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96 Hours: Koret Museum Days

The Koret Foundation marks Mother's Day, as well as its 30th anniversary, Sunday by sponsoring free admission at 17 Bay Area museums and science centers. Participating museums are the Asian Art Museum, Bay Area Discovery Museum, Chabot Space & Science Center, Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, Contemporary Jewish Museum, Exploratorium, Judah L. Magnes Museum, Lawrence Hall of Science, Legion of Honor, de Young Museum, Museum of the African Diaspora, Oakland Museum of California, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Zoo, San Jose Museum of Art, Tech Museum of Innovation and Zeum.

Koret Museum Day: Free admission at 17 sites: "

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Jelly Belly Stickerpalooza: Fun that sticks

Move over, Willy Wonka. The Chocolate Factory might be fun, but for a truly scrumdiddlyumptious outing mixed in with a bit of sticker creativity, check out the Jelly Belly Factory's Stickerpalooza, which started on Wednesday and runs through Friday at the factory's Fairfield (Solano County) location.

Although the factory tour is a memorable and fun trip for the family, lines for it can be long during spring break. But if you have an intrepid member of your party who's willing to wait in the tour line, the rest of your group can have fun with Stickerpalooza, says Barbara Marino, a spokesperson for Mrs. Grossman's. The beloved Petaluma sticker company, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, is bringing a bit of sticker fun to the candy factory. It certainly beats staring at the jelly-bean portrait of Ronald Reagan for half an hour.

Read more at Jelly Belly Stickerpalooza: Fun that sticks.

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Mudflat Festival: Learn about Richardson Bay

If you have a hankering to get down and dirty, head off to the Richardson Bay Audubon Center & Sanctuary's second annual Mudflat Festival. Timed to coincide with the reopening of Richardson Bay sanctuary's 900 acres to boats and public access, the event on Saturday will feature wildflower walks, a compost demo, plus art and poetry exhibits featuring works by kids from all over the Bay Area. The centerpiece, though, will be the opening of the beach area for kids to play in the mudflats and the tide pools.

Read more at SFGate.

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Deer Hollow Farm: Chance to pet animals on tours

With spring in the air, there's no better time to visit Deer Hollow Farm, which welcomes new lambs and kids - the goat-y kind - to their charming menagerie of pigs, chickens, rabbits, ducks and geese with spring farm tours.

Read more at the SF Chronicle website.

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Santa Cruz Boardwalk: summer fun year-round

Although you might associate the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with the shouts and screams of summer, now, in fact, is one of the best times to visit. Without the sticky crowds there are no lines for the roller coasters or the corn dogs, and from now until the end of May, all of the rides are open on weekends, weather permitting. And when the rumble of the rides and the buzz and jitter of the video games in the arcade become too much, you can always take a walk along the beach and skip stones into Monterey Bay.

There's more at the SF Chronicle Website.

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Tracing roots: 'Decoding Identity,' StoryCorps

"Take a quick look around, and you can see that America is not just a melting pot anymore. It's become a fluid cultural mosaic of complex ethnic and multiracial backgrounds that can be seen in the faces of our own families. President Obama's inauguration sparked not only a pride of recognition among African Americans but also a sense of solidarity among the almost 7 million people who checked off the 'multiple race' box in the U.S. census.

Categorizing or even describing multiracial identities can be a perplexing puzzle - Tiger Woods once described himself as "Cablinasian" (Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian) - but the time has never seemed riper for families to help their kids piece together the stories that make up their own rich ethnic backgrounds. "

Read more on the SF Chronicle Website.

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International Rubik's Cube Competition

If you're of a certain age, you might remember the original Rubik's Cube craze back in the 1980s, when Erno Rubik's fascinating, frustrating little mathematical toy swept the nation. Well, dust off your unsolved Rubik's Cube and give it to your kids, because 30 years later, at the 2009 International Rubik's Cube Competition at the Exploratorium, competitors are solving it with their eyes closed and with one hand tied behind their backs.

Read more on the SF Chronicle website.

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Leroy the river otter: Wet and wild

Leroy the river otter: Wet and wild:

The Coyote Point Recreation Area is a fabulous spot for hikes, beach strolls or just watching low-flying 747s sweep into nearby San Francisco airport. It's also the home to the Coyote Point Museum, a small gem of a wildlife center.

On Sunday, the museum starts a program of free admission on the first Sunday of each month. While there are many wildlife residents of the museum's outdoor habitats, the star attraction has to be Leroy, the 20-year-old North American river otter and oldest living male river otter in captivity.

Like many folks of a certain age, Leroy has lost a few teeth, but that doesn't stop him from happily gumming down whole fish as he slithers in the water to the delight of onlookers at his daily feedings.

Read more at the SF Chronicle website.

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96 Hours: Elephant seals--Tour winter breeding grounds

This weekend and for the next few months, you can get more than a glimpse of one of the most unusual animals in California wildlife just off Highway 1, an hour and a half south of San Francisco. Each year, thousands of elephant seals come back to the beaches of Año Nuevo State Reserve, where hundreds of new pups will be born, and the adult males will duke it out with each other and find a female to mate with before returning to the ocean.

With its trunklike nose and ground-shaking, throaty roar, the northern elephant seal is one of the most impressive and strangest mammals in the ocean, making its home along the Pacific coast as far south as Mexico. On average, they spend more than three-fourths of their lives in water, but when the elephant seals come ashore, they like to vacation - like many humans - along the California coast.

Read more on the Chronicle website.

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96 Hours: 'Peter Pan': Children get into the act

For an early holiday treat, the high-flying musical 'Peter Pan' fits the bill. But it's more than just a chance to take in an entertaining musical: An afternoon with Children's Musical Theater could also sow the seeds for a budding actor or actress.

The company got its start as the Cabrini Community Theater in 1968, founded by John Healy, himself a young performer who wanted to create a theater accessible to everyone. Deemed the largest youth theater company in the country - and now under the artistic direction of Kevin Hauge - the theater follows an unusually inclusive policy of casting every child who auditions. Last year, according to marketing associate Heather Lerner, thousands of kids turned up at the auditions, and all of them went onstage in at least one of the company's multiple-cast productions."

Read more on the SF Chronicle website.

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Yerba Buena Learning Gardens

The Yerba Buena Gardens provides a wide assortment of delights for children, with the Zeum museum, the carousel and Paul Lanier's 10-foot-tall Wishing Tree. But what parents might not know is that on weekends Yerba Buena Gardens also offers Learning Days, a year-round series of free workshops and events designed to foster the green thumb.

"It's one of the best kept secrets in town," Mary McCue, the general manager of Yerba Buena Gardens, says of the program that has been quietly teaching urban kids the basics of gardening for almost 10 years.

"It started when we were taking a group around on a tour of the Yerba Buena Gardens," she recalls, " and we had a little boy in the group who said he was going to start a garden, too. He said he was going to plant tomatoes and carrots ... and lamb chops. And I thought, 'Oh my, we need to teach these kids about gardening!' "

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

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Target Family Day at downtown museums

Explore four of the city's liveliest museums - the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora, Zeum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - as they and the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival offer activities, performances and free admission as part of Target's Family Day on Sunday.

On the Esplanade Stage, the Unique Derique and the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company will be among the many performers, and at Zeum, kids will be able to ride the carousel for free all day long. A huge communal sidewalk mural is planned for the Museum of the African Diaspora, and over at the new Contemporary Jewish Museum, activities will celebrate the Jewish festival of Sukkot.

SFMOMA's Family Day earlier in the year brought in 2,400 visitors, but Sunday's mix of films, hands-on activities and events, inspired by the museum's eye-catching "Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900" exhibition, promises to attract even more.

Read more at the SF Chronicle website.

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Coastal Cleanup Day: Tidying up our shores

From bottles, cans and cigarette butts to old tires and oil drums, the tons of trash that litter our beaches and waterways also chokes the marine ecosystem and endangers wildlife. But on Saturday, tens of thousands of Californians will join in what the Guinness Book of World Records has deemed the world's largest trash collection effort: Coastal Cleanup Day.

It's the perfect project for families, school groups, scout troops or community organizations, says the Marine Mammal Center's Ann Bauer.

In 2007, more than 60,000 volunteer cleaners removed 900,000 pounds of trash and recyclable materials from California's shores. In the Bay Area, you can come out between 9 a.m. and noon to one of dozens of sites, grab a trash bag and a check-off sheet and join in the pickup.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

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96 Hours: Palo Alto Junior Museum

Founded in 1934 in the basement of the local elementary school, the Junior Museum has since grown into a beloved small gem in Palo Alto. The indoor museum area features rotating exhibits and lots of mechanical activities of the hands-on variety, showing how gears work or letting kids play with air bellows.

If you can pry kids away from the activities, out the back door is a small but highly appealing zoo with a bevy of critters that range from the tame (turtles, snakes and ducks) to the exotic (peacocks) to the wild (bobcats and a leopard shark). Many of the zoo's residents were carefully chosen as representatives of the local wildlife - an effort to foster understanding about the creatures that share the Bay Area with humans. It seems to be working: The kids cluster around the owl and ooh and ahh as it swivels its head 180 degrees. At a larger cage, visitors crane their necks to look at a red-tailed hawk while others brush past to see the fruit bats.

Read more on the SF Chronicle website.

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96 Hours: Strawberry Picking

Nothing tastes better on a hot summer day than fresh berries and cream, and in the Bay Area, we're lucky enough to be able to get our hands on some of the best organic strawberries and olallieberries in the country. You could pick your fruit at the local Whole Foods, but why not pick it right from the plant?

Just off Highway 1 north of Santa Cruz, Swanton Berry Farm offers berry aficionados the chance to roam their fields and collect a perfect basket of fruit while enjoying the sun, breezes and spectacular views over the Pacific. With warm days in the sun and cool nights wrapped in ocean fog, conditions on these coast-side acres are ripe for growing sweet, flavorful berries. One bite of a succulent Swanton strawberry and you'll see why they're so prized by connoisseurs like local jammaker June Taylor, who uses strawberries from the farm in her renowned preserves.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

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Family films at Frameline32

Two shows geared for the young ones make up a special matinee at the San Francisco International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Film Festival at the Castro Theatre on Sunday. They at last herald the arrival of children's media that blend non-traditional families into the fabric of the show.

First up is "Dottie's Magic Pockets," the brainchild of Tammy Stoner and Pink Pea Productions, which is designed not just to be gay- and lesbian-friendly, but also to feed a growing appetite for programming that introduces kids to the modern world's broad family range.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

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Mission to Mars at Chabot Center

The Red Planet takes center stage at the Chabot Space & Science Center's Mars Phoenix Landing Celebration this weekend, a great opportunity to indulge any budding space explorer.

Chabot will be throwing a landing party sure to spark the imaginations of anyone who's ever wondered about life on Mars. Over three days, visitors can follow the progress of the 1,500-pound Phoenix spacecraft as this first entrant in NASA's Mars Scout program completes its 422 million-mile journey, and - in just seven tense minutes - decelerates from its 12,500-mph plunge toward Mars to, it is hoped, gently land on its own three feet Sunday afternoon.

Read more on the the SF Chronicle website.

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