Day 1
6/13/16
My first day of camp as well as some of the Girls Scouts was overwhelming as well as extremely fun. In the end I am just happy that I survived but also learned the girls names and a little bit about them. I was pleasantly surprised with how well many of the activities went – especially the Stream of Consciousness exercise.
Originally we decided to have them continually write for 3 minutes however we tried 10 minutes and all most all of the girls diligently wrote the entire time and complained that it was not enough time after words. I was thrilled to see so many budding writers in class. We even allowed them to continue writing and they did so without any push or help. This was shocking to me because I have always imagined being met with resistance for writing. Many of the girls, even the ones that refused to write came up with unique ideas during the 10 minutes. I would like to have the girls do a 5 minute stream of consciousness everyday to get the creativity flowing. I am very excited to see what they create tomorrow when we discuss poetry more in depth.
One thing that I felt could have been better was the use and creation of emails so that the girls could have websites. The girls could get it, however it was a lengthy process as well as frustrating. Another thing I noticed was that once we changed the lesson plan, it was impossible to get back on track. It was very well organized in the morning and then the afternoon we were trying to figure out where to pick up ect…
We had planned to give them a writing prompt: “And suddenly the 30 strangers in the room felt like the closest of friends.” Instead we went to Start – Up exhibit which was fun but then we were unable to follow our curriculum afterwards. In the end this did not matter as all the girls wrote stories without the prompt or worked on their website. The problem was that it created a time crunch and we ended up not doing the last activity either which was to learn photoshop. We instead created pixel art logos that we will digitize tomorrow. In the end we did not lose anything important and in fact covered well with the pixel activity.
Day 2
6/14/16
Today was extremely successful and fun for me, although I know that Victoria had a rough time at one point. We started the day off with designing a personalized Luchador mask, which started with a name, then draw your mask and thus extended into creating the mask physically. We then split into two groups and one group focused on doing Haiku while the other did erasure poetry. After that we finished up the day with sharing our poetry to the entire group and then cleaning the classroom.
For our icebreaker we decided to talk about Luchador masks. We found a fun website that would generate a Luchador name. This was extremely hilarious and fun. The girls all picked out a name and wrote it on their Kleenslate board. Then they drew what they would want their masks to look like. They were having so much fun we decided to extend the activity and brought out Art supplies so that they could create physical representations of their masks.
After this, we split the girls into two groups and I took half and Victoria took the other half. We needed to do this because the Erasure Poetry required photoshop and we did not have enough computers with that application. In my group, we talked about Haiku and how to create it. Then we played with Haikucubes to help us create them. I came up with multiple challenges for them using the cubes. They had so much fun. Some of the challenges:
- Create a group Haiku
- Make a Haiku with only the words on the blocks
- Choose one word and that is your Title
- Choose three words and each word starts each line of the Haiku
- Each girl takes turns and chooses one word until we make a Haiku
The first group excelled with this activity and Anthony did interpretive readings of their haikus. I did have one girl who told me she will not participate and as hard as I tried I could not get her to join the activity.
Unfortunately, while this activity was going on, Victoria had a very frustrating time with her group during the Erasure poetry because MOST of the girls refused to participate in the activity. They just flat out said “We refuse to participate.” They acted silly and played games behind Victoria’s back. After lunch we switched groups and I also had a very hard time with the group. They participated but refused to follow directions and just screamed and acted wild. We still accomplished haikus however which I was happy for. They also performed interpretive readings at least. We decided to be more careful with which girls get grouped together.
Day 3
6/15/16
Today was Bandojo day. We started the day off with updating their blogs from poetry day. Then our guest speaker taught them how to use Bandojo until lunch time. After that we introduced podcasting to the girls and then split them into 3 groups and had them facilitate a podcast. After this we had them make and record their own music in Bandojo in groups of two.
Day 4
6/16/16
We went to Meow Wolf today!
Day 5
6/17/16