6/6: My First Week as an Intern

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 reasons, only adults can work the glue gun, so the teacher and I were the only people who could use it. With the glue gun, I assisted the kids with building a fairy garden. These gardens were used to educate kids on the Bok Botanical Garden and botanical gardens in general. A fairy garden is a small garden made up of fake plants and decorations. The kids got to build their own gardens in their own style. While most kids built a garden, there was one kid who ended up building a sacrificial volcano. Aside from working the glue gun, the main task the teacher and I assisted with was helping the kids create their own ideas with the limited crafting materials. We helped the kids use egg cartons as mountains and houses. We encouraged them to use construction paper to serve as water, paths, and grass. The other crafting activity I assisted with was the motorcycle activity. This activity involved building motorcycles from a STEM kit in order to highlight Daytona Bike Week. Given the complexity of building a motorcycle in a group, my main task was to make sure the kids worked together and were able to build the motorcycle. Not to brag, but my groups were the only ones to finish their motorcycles. My experience was that the kids greatly preferred the fairy garden to the motorcycle exercise since they got to show off their own creative expression, and they got to keep the gardens. With these activities, the kids seemed disinterested in Bok and Daytona, so I am unsure how much the kids really learned. The other activity group produced similar results.

Artifacts Handled by the Children

The experience activities covered the exploration of the galleries. In the exploration of the galleries, I watched over the kids in the gallery to make sure they were not breaking the exhibits or being too rough with each other. I also helped the kids understand the subject matter being presented in the gallery. The most exciting area for the kids were the pirate displays and the tourist artifacts. The kids even got to handle some of the artifacts. I was surprised they trusted the kids with breakable objects, but with the kids wearing gloves and sitting on the floor, there was little concern for them breaking things. The artifacts consisted of various pieces of tourism history trivia. There were three ceramic knick-knacks such as a Circus World Plate, Sea World creamer, and an Alligator pepper shaker from the 1950s. The duck post comes from an old duck themed stop and the Amway sign is a relic from the now KIA center. The piece of wall comes from the old Splendid China park. The kids seemed really interested in the old artifacts. The kids were also interested in the Orlando gallery more than anything else in the week since the gallery featured a wide variety of artifacts. 

After this week, I got to see how the camp functions on a daily basis. Getting to see how the kids interact with history provides me with a window into how childhood education works and the challenges educators face when working with children. With another couple weeks, I hope that I will be able to feel comfortable enough as a teacher to take on and lead a class soon.