Every parade opens with a story
Every parade opens with a story, and from the first moment, the Doodles are alive.
When you walk away... The Doodles come out and play!
Give them the 2-3 weeks they'll never forget.
Giant color-and-erase characters take over the building. Every room adopts one, names it, and colors it to life.
Pre-K through 8th grade · Schools, libraries, day cares · No screens
Pencil in your paradeFor schools in your state
- Kids find out each morning what their Doodle did overnight.
- Pulls families and the whole community together.
- Kids practice kindness, creativity, and standing up for each other.
- What does your state require?
Every room adopts a Doodle
Every room adopts a Doodle of its own. The kids name it and color it to life, and from that moment it isn't a decoration. It's part of the group.
What happens when the kids walk away?
Whenever the kids step away, the Doodle gets into something, and they have to help set it right. Coloring becomes the reward for kindness, cooperation, and good work.
The week
Each week a new challenge drops. Some mornings every Doodle is found gathered in one place. Some weeks they swap rooms like pen pals. End of the week, a celebration.
The town
Doodles visit the bakery, the mayor's office, the nursing home, and spend weekends at kids' homes, with the whole community posting along.
For a few weeks, the whole building feels like stepping into a storybook. Kids get a place that's theirs. The grown-ups get a building that's alive. You get both, and the whole community watching it happen.
You pick the dates, the theme, and the grand entrance. Everything else shows up ready.
Ready to run
Activities
Documented for Ohio
A sponsor or PTA can cover it.
- Your PTA or PTSA. We give you a note to send them.
- A local business. We'll help you find one.
- Your budget or a grant. Your school or PTA applies. We give you the quote, the description, and the paperwork.
- Not sure yet?. We'll figure it out together. You can switch anytime.
Your district decides which funds apply.
What the research says, and what it does not.
No one has studied a DoodleFace Parade yet, and we say so. Here is what the nearest research found.
The first large-scale randomized trial of arts education in schools (42 Houston schools, grades 3 to 8) found that schools adding arts experiences over a school year had fewer students with discipline infractions, better writing scores, and more empathy. It found no change in attendance or in math and reading scores.
The Community Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of public health experts, recommends school-based anti-bullying programs. It found small but meaningful reductions in bullying in a review of 69 randomized trials, and its finding applies to elementary and middle schools. The parade's kindness and anti-bullying activities are built to add to your school's program, not to replace it. Those programs ran much longer than a parade. Two large reviews found that, within the range they studied, longer programs did not do better than shorter ones. A third found that longer, more intensive anti-bullying programs did better. None of this shows a short program works.
So we built the parade to be measured. It is designed to meet ESSA Tier IV: a written rationale, and a plan your school runs from records it already keeps. Your district makes that determination. No student surveys. We will publish what founding schools report.
Findings from the research the parade is built on, not results measured at a parade. The practices it draws on appear in about 30 peer-reviewed studies and reviews of children in schools and early childhood programs. No study of the parade yet.