Week Two at the Witte: Learning the Ropes [Estrella Hernandez]

Dear YAP Familia,

This week had been an absolute whirlwind, and I’ve loved it! I helped the Witte’s programming office host a camp for kids ages six to eight called “Learning the Ropes”. The campers got to learn a bit about museums each day and how they function. They explored all the exhibits, participated in interactive demonstrations hosted by the museum staff, and listened to panelists explain their work. In some ways, it reminded me of Washington Week - albeit less intense and with more snack times. It was interesting to see the kids get progressively more and more excited about working in a museum. By the end of the week, a lot of campers were pledging to return as volunteers or employees.

I took this photo in the middle of the crafting process.
You can see the supplies we started to assemble, and some of the camper's nature walk bags.
All of this culminated in amazing work!

I helped to facilitate their big project: building a mini-museum! After much deliberation, the campers decided to delegate their work across four departments (Another parallel to YAP!). Most campers created exhibits on natural history, science, art, or history. We did have occasional deviations, like kids who made entire pieces describing their love for American Ninja Warrior or Pokémon. The process of creating these exhibits involved a lot of hot glue, paint, and writing. Each one of them seemed to be intensely focused on fulfilling a specific vision they had. They wrote small labels for their creations, lists of needed materials, and worked as hard as they could to share what they learned. Some of the campers even teamed up to make their exhibits! One of the coolest pieces featured a “river” that flowed past various species of dinosaurs, before falling into a box decorated with pipe-cleaner trees.

This video was recorded by a volunteer who also worked on the camp with me. 

It really shows off the completed piece well!

While the campers were learning about the basics of running a museum, I got a crash course on creating educational curriculum for children. While I’ve been tasked with taking care of my younger relatives, I’d never worked with kids as a teacher instead of caretaker. I did have some difficulty at first. It was hard for me to not confuse names, or explain concepts that had begun to seem natural to me. Thanks to the patience of the programming team, and help of a few other volunteers, I slowly acclimated to approaching the world through a kid’s eyes. My supervisor explained that we gave kids a journal with defined daily tasks to make all the content they learned more digestible. Telling anyone - much less a seven year old - to explain everything they knew about museum creation in the space of two pages may seem impossible. But dividing this question up, and offering guidance on how to approach it, changed how the campers interacted with their education. Asking them what they knew about a topic, what they wanted to know, and what they had learned at different times in the day greatly increased their responsiveness. It also gave them a sense of agency over their time at camp. While they all participated in the same events, each camper got to focus on topics particularly important to them.

An example of the "What I Know, Want to Know, and Learned" journaling system we used.
We usually referred to it as the "KWL".

Next week, I’ll be focusing on two big projects for the Witte. I’ll be writing my own “Witte Walk”, to introduce visitors to an exhibit celebrating San Antonio’s tricentennial. I’m super excited to share the experiences held within “Confluence and Culture”, and trace my city’s history from a small outpost on the Spanish frontera to one of the ten most-populated cities in the United States. I’ll also be translating anatomical vocabulary into Spanish for some interactive pieces in the H-E-B Body Adventure. I hope that by working on this project, I can empower even more museum visitors to engage directly with the amazing exhibits available here. My other goal is to encourage the medical students who work with these materials to discover the beauty of Spanish. A lot of them have Spanish-speaking patients, but feel disconnected from them by a language barrier. I hope that this will be a small bridge to break that divide, and help them build closer relationships with their patients and community.

I’m looking forward to hosting a YAP Community Outreach event with Sealia this week! We plan to read Drum Dream Girl to kids at a local library. I’ll let you know all about it in my next post.

Until next time,
Estrella Hernandez