Clayton News Daily

Photo by Curt Yeomans Arts Clayton Kaleidoscope Summer Art Camp participants show off their adjectives during a “Schoolhouse Rock!”-inspired camp finale performance, on Friday.

One may be the loneliest number in the eyes of Three Dog Night, but more than 100 local children think “Three is a Magic Number.”

They also believe in a strange extraterrestrial being, known only as “Interplanet Janet,” and they can talk to animated pieces of legislature while reciting the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

The youngsters have been to “Conjunction Junction,” where they took a train to a noun that is either a person, a place or a thing. When they got there, they unpacked their adjectives.

And, all of that happened in the span of an hour, during the “Schoolhouse Rock, Jr. Live!”-themed finale of Arts Clayton’s Kaleidoscope Summer Art Camp on Friday.

“I think it was our most ambitious musical yet [for a camp finale], and the kids pulled it off flawlessly,” said Camp Administrator Elizabeth Gower.

The finale was comprised of songs from the old “Schoolhouse Rock!” series of cartoon shorts that ran between Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s and 1980s. The selections focused on topics from the educational content areas of grammar, math, science and social studies.

The song lineup included “A Noun is a Person, Place or Thing;” “Three is a Magic Number;” “Unpack Your Adjectives;” “I’m Just a Bill;” “Preamble;” “Interplanet Janet,” and “Conjunction Junction.” Each song served as the backdrop for dances the children did, ranging from “The Twist,” to “The Watusi,” to the “Can-Can,” to twirling feather boas.

“It was just great,” said dance instructor Mygnon Walters. “The dancers were full of energy, and ready to move every day. They were just excited to learn different kinds of dance.”

Camper Kira McCoy, 5, said she particularly liked the production’s “Conjunction Junction” finale, which played up the song’s big band jazz style with a trio of female campers doing a very mild, family-friendly version of a burlesque-style dance number.

“The performance was awesome,” she said. “I thought it was very good.”