work week

This week I taught my first two classroom outreach classes for the museum. Calif. Indian Life and Culture. The ages ranged from five through ten years old. I was a little terrified. Yes, terrified of children. Thirty sets of little judgmental eyes just waiting to eat me alive. It turned out well though. The kids were all interested (or at least pretended) and enjoyed the hands on time. None of them were bleeding when I left and the museum teaching collection all made it back intact. I'm calling it a success. Plus all excellents on the evaluations from the teachers helped out a bit.
Also went out and helped with a nature awareness training for teenagers who will be volunteering in camp programs this year and helping out with younger kids. Groups of twelve for ten minutes at a time for around two hours, almost 100 teenagers in a park in the middle of the afternoon. Yeah, I was ready for a drink by the end of the day. How I ended up teaching the "Which Tree Am I?" station is beyond me. (Although Dad was pretty proud that I remembered some of what he taught me as a kid.) We went over identification for ten native trees then they did their own observation of a nearby tree. They were to touch, smell and look at the tree and come up with their own name for it. A tool they could use with younger kids to get them to pay attention to the outdoors. Then they came back, we discussed, and I tested them on the original ten trees and their uses. And I was pleasantly surprised that most of them actually retained the info. At least for those ten minutes. Hopefully they at least remember a few by now. But that wasn't the main point for them anyway. It was to more to get them comfortable to encourage the kids they mentor to observe nature around them.
Oh yeah, and I worked at the bank twice. Still not my favorite place to be. At least it's air conditioned.