Summer Internship Blog

I had to take the last week off, but I am back with some exciting events from this week. The theme of this week's camp focused on animals from my understanding. Given the various extra activities on the schedule, I did not get to see all of the scheduled class activities. The kids visited the nature exhibition in order to learn about the natural environments animals live in here in Florida. In terms of the regular class activities, the class created pet rocks and clay animals in order to get them thinking about animals. We also had the kids build spider webs and fly around like hummingbirds to show how animals behave in the wild. While these class activities were fun, the real highlights were the special activities.  Starting with the field trip, this week went to the WonderWorks located on I-Drive. If you haven't been to a WonderWorks before, it is a science museum chain filled with various games. While some of these games are standard games, most of the games feature educatio...

This is the second week of the Summer Camp for the Orange County Regional History Center. Each week of the camp focuses on a different aspect of Florida history. Last week' focused on Florida's tourism. For this week's lessons, the theme was set around the pioneers who built Florida.  As I talked about in my last blog post, the activities at the camp focus on either experience activities and crafting activities. This time around, I will start with the experience activities. I did not get to experience this activity, but the kids focused on acting out a script since famous singer and actress Ariana Grande comes from Florida. The main experience activity I assisted with was another artifact exhibition. This time the exhibition took place in the Pioneer gallery on the 4th floor. This section focuses on the Native American and Pioneer history of the 1800s. During this visit, the kids got to handle several pioneer tools like a teapot, an old-fashioned iron, a hoof knife from the...

This week I began my internship in earnest as part of the Orange County Regional History Center's Adventures in History Summer Camp. During this week, I focused on getting a feel for the needs of the job. My scheduled time runs from 9 am to 2 pm, which covers most of the educational periods for the students. The camp follows a weekly scheduled with each week having a different theme. The activities for this week revolved around tourism in Florida. My job as an educator matched up to what I was expecting after my training day last week. The activities appeared divided into two main types, crafting activities and experience activities.  In the crafting activities, the students would be tasked with crafting, coloring, or building something related to the lesson. During these class activities, my main job involved assisting the kids with tasks that were too difficult or too dangerous for the kids to do on their own. The "danger" in question was a hot glue gun. For legal reaso...