(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (gentle music) - Coming up on today's show.

(gentle music) - Ballet is beautiful.

It's all of the beautiful things in life.

Everyone is in the theater, they're sitting there, they're feeling it.

You're all sharing that beautiful moment.

(lively music) - When you've got a well-read community, then you have all.

I would say, a prosperous economy as well.

(lively music) - To see what it's doing for them, and to know what it's done for me, I ain't gonna stop.

(lively music) - We need a place like this for just average parents to help their kids be able to communicate.

(lively music) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - Ballet is beautiful.

It's all of the beautiful things in life.

Everyone is in the theater, they're sitting there, they're feeling it.

You're all sharing that beautiful moment.

Visually, beautiful.

The sound, beautiful.

Beauty.

(chuckles) (gentle music) - Central Illinois Ballet is the only professional ballet company in Peoria.

It's a special place.

It's a small community of artists who are just here to spread the joy of dance and storytelling to the people in our community.

Cornerstone Academy is our training school, whereas Central Illinois Ballet is the professional company.

- Our professional dancers help with our academy, and almost all, except for one of our performances during the year, involves not only our professionals, but our academy as well.

- You can dance here at any age, starting at two years old is the youngest, and then I believe our oldest dancer is 78.

We offer a little bit of everything, starting at ballet, which is what we put forward.

That's our thing.

But it's also extremely important for young dancers to learn other styles, such as jazz, and that goes into contemporary, where it really starts to loosen up, modern, where you're starting to loosen up, but learn how to control, like, truly from within, your muscles and all of that.

And then going into hip hop, which is just having a good time breaking it down.

(gentle music) - My portion of what I'm kind of in charge of is our professional company, which is Central Illinois Ballet.

We right now consist, if you count me, 11 professional dancers from all over the states.

So every morning we go in and take class, and then every afternoon we have rehearsal with each other, with myself, and then we get to perform at least five times a year.

- These dancers are from all over the place.

We have people from Utah, Pennsylvania, I'm not the only one, Michigan, Texas, Florida.

All of these people from like around the US that are coming together and being able to create something.

And then everyone has such a positive attitude.

They all love what they're doing.

- We get paid for it, that our job.

It's like anybody else's nine to five.

It's like, you know, when you're five and you say, "Mom, I wanna be a ballerina."

It's like you never lost that.

You get to keep that with you, and you get to walk into the studio every day and pull out the shiny pink satin shoes and pull on your little tutu, and be like, "I get to be a ballerina every single day as my nine to five."

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - [Dyson] It's not just how amazing of a ballerina are you.

You learn discipline.

There's so much knowledge that comes with it that's going to feed you into any career that you go into truthfully.

So we're just trying to create really talented, humble, and hardworking kids.

- [Jessie] What we're doing here is taking amazing professionals from all over the country.

We have our wonderful little troop, and we are allowing this community to be able to come to our amazing professional shows.

And we're making it accessible for literally anyone in the community.

- We really just wanna reach out more to the central Illinois and greater Peoria areas.

We have so much to share with everyone, and we have dancers that are working so hard that you want everyone, like, I wish everyone in the world could come to our shows and just see our dancers, and see what they have to put out there.

- It's fun, it's magical, it's stressful, it's nerve wracking, but it's freeing all at the same time.

Just knowing that there's people out there who have been sucked into this story, who have been sucked into this piece, and are looking at it for the beauty that it is.

It's really inspiring.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (keyboard keys clacking) - That could be, "I can't understand how to do the FAFSA form.

I can't understand how my own children need what they need in school.

I can't understand what they're saying in the break room at work.

I don't understand what this word means.

I don't know how to advance this."

I could go on and on.

This program is funded through the Illinois Secretary of State.

It's a grant.

We work to have students that are 17 or above who are not enrolled in a public school.

The one great feature of this program is that it's a one-on-one tutoring, so it's different than some of the other literacy programs in that we take students where they are, we assess them, and then we line them up with a tutor.

You find illiteracy everywhere.

It is not just an urban problem, it's rural, it's suburban, it's everywhere.

We've seen it as retired educators.

We see it in the community.

We see it when we go into stores.

And I would say it's almost the quiet epidemic.

We take for granted so much how reading is fundamental.

We know that, we talk about it.

I think back on, you know, I was so fortunate, our parents, that we had books in our house, we were taught.

And it just came naturally.

It doesn't for everybody.

We have a tendency in our society today that technology will take care of everything.

You still have to know the basic building blocks, and that's reading.

(lively music) A young lady came to us and said that, "You know, my dad, we just found out he can't read."

And he was a retired gentleman, and through the program, he was able to read and function, and kind of has a brand new life, as you can imagine.

(lively music) (keyboard keys clacking) We pride ourselves in offering this program to tutors who come from all walks of life.

And I think that's what makes the program so successful.

You do not have to be a retired educator.

You have to simply be an adult who simply has some time to give, who really, truly wants to make a difference, a difference that can be tangible, but it also can pay dividends down the road.

(lively music) - I really think it's a great program, and I have teacher friends who are also tutors, and they're encouraged by the program, and encouraged what they're doing with the adult learners.

We learn the facts about the program, the expectations for us as tutors, and the time constraint, because as retirees, you always want to know, "How long do I have to commit to a program?"

And so they provided all of that information, and letting us know that, number one, it was flexible.

I kinda look at that as that when you've got a well-read community, then you have a, I would say, a prosperous economy as well.

- Our program relies on volunteers, and therefore all the materials you receive are free.

Our training is free, our follow-up is free, our assessments are free.

The progress you bring with the student is intangible.

It's worth so much.

Does not cost you a dime.

- And so I encourage other members of our community to check out the literacy program through the Regional Office of Education.

They'll find it very rewarding.

- Literacy is everything.

It's where you start.

If we wanna really, truly establish this community as a place to grow up, live, and stay, you have to have a good command of literacy in general.

Not just the language, but literacy in general.

All the ins and outs.

And I think as we talk a lot about businesses in this community wanting to retain, this is one of the most basic ways you can do that.

(lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (lively music) (upbeat percussion music) (upbeat percussion music continues) (upbeat percussion music continues) (lively music) - Music has always been a way to express myself, and I don't, you know, I don't, I can't, again, there's a lot of things I really can't put my finger on about a lot of this stuff.

My dad bought me a little djembe at Gurney Mills Mall near Chicago.

I used to play that along with the Incubus "S.C.I.E.N.C.E."

album.

And that is when I found the djembe.

And I wanna say that point in my life kind of changed the direction of my life.

I met kids to play music with, I toured the country a little bit with them, and eventually, you know, 20 years later, I'm building the instrument myself.

I've been doing this since I was about 16 years old.

When my first drum broke, I gave it to somebody to have it fixed, and it was given back a year later unfixed.

So I was a little frustrated, and decided that, you know, I should just, worst case scenario, if I tear it apart and I can't get it back together, it's still just a broken drum.

But I tore it apart, and realized that there was really not a whole lot to it.

Light bulb went off when I was 16.

Started maintenance in my own equipment in the band that I was playing with for years.

And then probably six years ago, something like that, I was wanting to do, get a another side gig, but I wanted to be at home with my kids more.

But then I went to go repair one of my drums, and the light bulb went off.

I was like, "The reason I know how to do this is 'cause no one around me does it."

(lively music) In those repairs, I got in, and one of them needed to be sanded down.

So I sanded down that repair.

And when I did, and I reoiled it, I saw some of the most beautiful wood I've ever seen in my life.

And that's when I, like, I knew I was hooked.

Between the sound and then the material, like, I was hooked.

I was made a small Facebook page for doing repairs, and before I knew it, I had a dozen drums sitting in my house.

And then I kinda knew, like, all right, this is cool.

This is something I can take seriously, you know what I mean?

And from there, it just grew.

(lively music) I always try to use the best quality material that I can, the really hard, very hard woods.

And just subsequently, they have some of the most beautiful grains I've ever seen in my life.

And if I would like to use the best material in the world, I need to get it outta West Africa.

(lively music) I will never look away from the quality of the wood that comes outta Africa, and I will always be a carpenter, so I'll always wanna create with the best materials that my hands, you know, can get.

It comes from an understanding of these people.

This is what they use to eat, this is how they feed their families, this is how their cultures thrive.

So I absolutely want to give back to that side of things, always just out of respect and understanding of what's going on.

So this facet of my company, the importing side, will always be a part of things to constantly be giving back to the root in which it came from.

I'll always try to move forward in carving my own pieces, because there's just so much creativity in it.

It's fun to just open up that log and see what kind of present is inside there waiting for you, you know what I mean?

It totally just, it'll speak to you while you're cutting it, and it's a pretty neat experience.

(lively music) I do have some pretty big plans.

I wanna offer prebuilt drums outta Africa, and then I wanna continue to turn my different exotic woods and locally-harvested woods.

I'm gonna start importing blanks of these exotic woods where it would more or less just be this, just about two inches thick, where I can take those exotic woods and put them on the lathe, and get the shapes that I would like with the exotic wood.

So that way it kind of helps me carve a little niche in the market of a product that you really can't get anywhere else, but through River Pirate Percussion.

(lively music) To see people's faces, their lives being changed.

Now I've been selling drums for, you know, eight or nine years now, and I've built lasting forever relationships with my customers, and it's to see what it's doing for them, and to know what it's done for me.

I ain't gonna stop.

(lively music) (lively percussion music) (lively music) ♪ Hello friends ♪ It is time to sign with us - Yeah.

(applauding) (group applauding) What we do here at Communication Junction is we give parents the tools to help support their children's spoken language development.

And we do that using American Sign Language, fun games, rhymes, all of those kinds of things in a small group setting.

Three, peekaboo.

- I like how much they learn, and how much they're able to carry that over at home, and it helps keep it when they're really young and have trouble like verbalizing, or I have trouble understanding, they're able to communicate better, and there's less frustration and less fits.

So as a mom, I really like that.

- We use signs to help learn new concepts.

So we're teaching colors, we're teaching shapes, we're teaching about animals, we're teaching about the alphabet.

And so since kids are such visual and hands-on learners, using science to help support that new learning is super helpful.

♪ My hands say peekaboo First, in order for a little one to start talking, they have to imitate.

That is the number one fundamental skill that a little one has to have is imitation.

What does imitation mean?

It means I do something and you copy it.

And at first they're gonna start imitating just like silly motor movements, or they might start imitating your facial expressions, or you know, a child as young as like three months old might be giggling at you in response to you smiling.

That's imitation.

That's their first form of communication with you.

Then we look for them to be imitating gestures.

Gestures are things that people are familiar with.

Waving, clapping, playing peekaboo, reaching up for your parent, reaching out to grab something.

These are all things that people are comfortable with, people do understand.

And the science behind gestures is that by 16 months old, we want our kiddos to have 16 different gestures.

Then, after gestures, come our signs, and signs are a way to take gestures into a formal language.

So we use American Sign Language vocabulary.

We're not teaching the language, we're just teaching vocabulary to help families.

Once they're imitating gestures, then they start imitating signs.

These are gestures that have some really great meaning to them.

Once they're imitating signs, then they start imitating sounds, and then they start imitating words.

So there's this whole continuum before they get to that first word.

- My daughter was on the lower end of the communication stuff at the doctors when they have you fill out all the forms.

And so I was like, "Okay, we'll do something to help communication."

So then we started coming, and loved it.

- A Lot of families hear sign language, and they think that we only work with deaf and hard-of-hearing kiddos, or maybe we work with kiddos who are in special needs programs.

However, our program is mostly comprised, like 90% of families who are just wanting to support their little ones' spoken language development.

We have all kinds of families who join us, but you do not have to have a child who has special needs, or who is deaf or hard-of-hearing, to join us.

Yeah.

- With my toddler, I can't always understand what he's saying, and he really, really wants to communicate it.

But if he has a sign, he has a way of telling me what's going on, and then the frustration is lessened.

And even with my daughter, when she could talk fairly well, there were a few words I couldn't understand, and she'd start getting mad and then sign it.

In particular was gentle, she didn't understand, and she was just like, "Gentle."

And then I understood, and then she was fine.

It has definitely decreased tantrums for both kids, because they're able to communicate.

It has increased communication between us.

It has helped our relationship.

- The wait lists for early intervention programming are so long that families are not getting the services that they need in a timely fashion.

And so we are a great place to help educate parents, model strategies, model skills, that they can be using with their kids, whether they have a delay or not.

Everything that we're doing here is helping families support that spoken language journey.

- We need a place like this for just average parents to help their kids be able to communicate.

It gives them a way to communicate earlier, and decreases a lot of that frustration, which then makes parenting easier, because you are able to communicate with your child.

- Every community needs a place like Communication Junction where all children are welcome, where we're educating families on how to support their children's spoken language development, where there's an opportunity for socialization.

We are a great place to help educate parents, model strategies, model skills that they can be using with their kids, whether they have a delay or not.

Everything that we're doing here is helping families support that spoken language journey.

Open.

A lot of families come because they've heard that signing will help their little one's spoken language development, but they stay because of the community that they have built in their class, and the relationships that they're making.

The end.

- [Group] Thanks for watching.

- [Narrator] Thank you for joining us on this journey.

If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to explore even more local content.

You can connect with us on our social media channels, visit our website, or download the free app.

We can't wait to see you next time on "You Gotta See This."

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