"The Design Camp"

Hey this is Ming, I’ve been away these few days, but now I’m back. Last week we’ve been working at the design camp, which took place in the garden we’ve been maintaining for the past few weeks. At this design camp, we’ve met 10 wonderful campers between the age of 7 and 10, Jonah, Eoin, Eamon, Shea, William, Jack, Abby, Maia, Ethan, and Elan.

In this camp we’ve helped them in creating their own designs for their T-shirt prints and stepping stones. They would also be working on their note book sometimes, filling it up with their beautiful experiences and memories of this camp. When they are not working on their design projects, they are helping us around with the garden. They got to plant flowers, pull the weeds, pick the beans, and other garden maintenance.

And when they weren’t doing any work, they get to have free time to play. They would play in the sprinkler, or the mud to keep cool from the heat. We interns would have to look after them as they played in the sun. However besides from doing that, we also joined them in their activities. We hosted baseball games, badminton, and water fights. During lunch time we would join the kids as they swallowed down food that they’ve been longing for all day. We had all kinds of food in this camp, we had pizza, egg rolls and dumplings, sandwiches, and so on.

On the third day of the week we went on a field trip where we visited the Noguchi Museum, where the kids got to explore and find their favorite sculptures. After seeing all the artistic creations by Noguchi, we took a break and had lunch at the Socrates Sculpture park. We played tag, capture the flag, chased Eric around, and all kind of fun games.

On the last day of design camp, I along with all the interns came to the park early in the morning to prepare water ballon for our revenge on the kids. Later in the day we waited patiently for the right time to attack the kids, as the kids were finishing up their stepping stone. When the time came, we took all the kids out to the park and blasted each and everyone of them with water ballons. Surprised, the kids attacked back and we had the water fight of the century. As day approached night, we get ready to leave for the day. After saying goodbye to the kids, we walked out of the park and never looked back.

...Leaving behind an experience that we will all cherish, forever. ^^

Where it's "still" at...

Hey, this is Annie, and you’re returning to “where it’s AT!” (a sad smile on my face emerges now haha.) For the past week the Hester Street Collaborative held its first (ever!) Design Camp for kids. It was a greatly tiring and fun week for us interns, who basically watched and played with the ten kids. We took care of a lot of business this week: making concrete stepping stones to be put into the ground in the garden, silk-screening with the kids (and making t-shirts and book covers), taking care of the garden, painting, making models of the garden, and, most of all, cleaning! And on Wednesday, we went to the Noguchi museum where we saw a lot of sculptures and designing, and then to Socrates Sculpture Park nearby.

Besides all the work, though, I think I really enjoyed the camp, mostly because I was able to have fun with the kids, and the kids were able to roam around and explore their imaginations. (And the food and cold drinks weren’t too bad, either.) We even had bottle fights with water. On Friday, to get back at the kids for all their “evil” efforts at getting us interns soaking wet, we came in early in the morning to make water balloons, and we proceeded to give them their “present” later on in the day (imagine some evil laughter right now). I think the best part of the week for me was when I got Maia to eat part of a turkey sandwich, even though she originally turned down my generous offer. I guess part of me wants to realize that I DO have the potential to become a teacher one day, and I feel I have those instincts, to “manipulate” kids into eating and having fun while learning at the same time. (It’s also nice to know that after taking a career test the other day for CPC orientation that teaching would probably be the best career for me haha).

Last week was great; I’m going to miss making the kids laugh at my super-duper corny jokes (because they’re the only ones that will), playing in the mud pit, and generally having fun as a kid again (now that I’m 18, those days will soon be over, and I’m quite sad about that). There are definite things that we discussed today that can be changed about the design camp, mostly changes in the organization and structuring of the camp, but overall it went really well for the first camp ever. And this week, although we are finished with design camp and feeling TAN-tastic, we still have a lot of work to do, and onward we move! So until my next blog entry, this has been where it’s AT.

Hey everyone!!!

This is Carmen speaking again. I am exhausting from last week’s design/build boot camp, but it was a great experience and a lot of fun. Each day was filled with creative activities and noisy children covered in mud. Every morning, the campers would start their day by watering the plants and pulling out weeds. Then they would start on their projects such as texture rubbing, silk screening, scavenger hunting, t-shirt making, stepping stone making, and model building. After lunch, the campers had several hours of free time. Guess what took place during this period? WATER FIGHT!!! Yes, all the campers attacked the interns so we decide to get them back. We purposely arrived early on the last day to fill up water balloons. In the end, the interns went against each other.

In this past week, we also spent a day at the Noguchi Museum and the Socrates Sculpture Park. The kids found their favorite sculptures and drew them. At the park, all the kids chased Eric around until his shirt and book bag were torn. Poor Eric! Anyways, I had a great time with these adorable, energetic kids. I look forward to working with others in the future.

This week is my last week at Hester Street Collaborative. I hope to accomplish as much as I can in this short period of time so I must get working. I’ll be back before you know it.

See you later!

Ahhh yes, Design Camp…

If there was one word that can describe that week, it would be crazy. It was organized chaos in a sense because there were so many things going on at once. At one point it was pretty hard to keep track of the campers. Even though they were a handful, every moment was worth it.
We had many activities that we did to carry us through the day. We did silk screening, painting, water fights, and stepping stones. And on top of all of those activities, we also had to maintain the garden. All in all, it was a week well spent.
On the first day that I was there (Tuesday), I was working with the kids to silk screen their t-shirt. They came up with extremely good designs. Some of them were snakes, worms, bears, etc. Considering the fact that they were silk screening for the first time, their prints came out pretty well. Even their t-shirts look professional. They really did a good job. The only thing that would’ve been better was if there was more room so that more people can do the silk screen at the same time. The tables were too small to support a lot of people at once.

Besides the silk screens, we also did some relief drawings by rubbing the piece of paper on some leaves and when we were at the Socrates Sculpture Garden, we did a rubbing on the shark fin. Speaking of the garden, we had a lot of fun there. We played freeze tag, capture the flag, and watched Eric getting beat up. I think they took a liking to Eric because that would explain why they kept on beating him up. While we were at the park, the kids also did a sketch of their favorite sculpture at the park.
While the rest of the interns are describing their week at the design camp, I on the other hand feel that is important to talk about how we are going to improve the design camp. The camp went very well considering the face that this was the first time that we were doing it.

At the meeting that we had today, we discuss some of the ways in which we can improve the design camps. Some of the ideas that we came up were that we should be more organized, more activities. We said that we have to be more organized because there were a few days in which we were confused in what we were suppose to do. To fix that, we are planning to hold a meeting each day after the design camp ends to plan for the next day. Even the design camp was successful this year, we feel that there should be more activities because that would give the children more options on what they would like to do.



Now that the design camp is over, it will never be forgotten because of all of the great times we do. For now, we are resuming our own individual projects that we later are going to present to each other. Currently, I am doing a photo essay/book on how the individual household owner can live a life that is environmentally friendly.
See you next week!

Mindy's Last Post

Mindy is here again! This will be the last week working for this summer. Work at HSC has been a blast and a great learning experience. Just from a few weeks, I learned how to silkscreen, work on Illustrator, basic gardening, work with kids, create stepping stones, and so much more. Time sure flies by! Hopefully I will be able to work here during this fall!

We helped supervise a Design Camp last week. The cute little campers were all from ages of six to ten-years-old. They were adorable small designers, architects, and artists. The creative campers built a ‘river’ in the mud pit, getting mud all over their bodies. They basically took a mud bath! Besides building a ‘river’, they dug for worms. There were at least seventy worms found. How often do you find a mud pit in NYC? Pretty awesome for the Design Camp to have a mud pit for the kids. I would have loved to play in one if I were younger.

Well time to return to work!