Three young beauties last Saturday won crowns in the Miss Kids Fest 592 after competing with nine other contestants at Movietowne during the fourth edition of the pageant.
The winners are Thuraia Lovell in the five to seven years old category, Maleah Hohenkerk in the eight to ten years old category, and Latisha Walker in the 11-14 years old category. All twelve contestants competed in Talent, Creative Costume, and Princess Gown segments.
Kids Fest 592 was founded in 2017 by event planner and designer Natalya Thomas-Small as an event through which the pageant is one of the major activities created. Usually the event, inclusive of the pageant, is held on one day where parents engage in various activities with their children. However, owing to COVID-19 and wanting to create an environment where social gathering is minimized, they collaborated with Movietowne to turn the event into a season spread between March and April.
Natalya noted that the event was not held last year because of the pandemic. However, though it was cancelled, there had already been a designated theme which they took this year and ran with.
“This pageant has helped our young ladies to be a lot more bold, confident and outspoken while they’re having fun,” Natalya said. “When they started out, many of them were very shy. We also had a differently-abled child in the pageant. Even though she couldn’t speak well, we wanted to include her.”
The contestant she spoke of is Lily Cruickshank who won the Best Prize for the Bravery and Confidence Award.
As part of the Kids Fest 592 season, Natalya also took the contestants to visit the Sorsha Williams Foundation for Autism & Special Needs Education at Mahaicony, which was an educational experience for them.
On Wednesday last they competed in the Impromptu Speech Competition, while yesterday they participated in the Spelling B and Creative Arts competitions.
A past executive operations coordinator for the Miss World Guyana Competition in 2016/2017/2018, Natalya shared that it was always a dream of hers to compete in a pageant, but she was never able to follow through with this and settled on working behind the scenes, which she has come to thoroughly enjoy.
She believes skills are best honed when started at an early age which is what Kids Fest 592 tries to do through its pageant, impromptu speech, Spelling B, and Creative Arts competitions. However, having fun is also a fundamental part of a child’s life and Kids Fest 592 tries to incorporate this as well. Many little girls, shared Natalya, dream of becoming princesses like the ones in their Disney movies and while she cannot take them to Disneyland, she tries to bring Disneyland to them through her fun themes.
