-Michael Nicholas, Social Media and Marketing Intern
With the DIY (Do It Yourself) and maker movements gaining traction across the country, hands on learning experiences for children have started to get the recognition they deserve. The Long Island Children’s Museum has always fostered an interactive learning experience for kids, but with the rise of maker faires and sites like instructables.com and makezine.com it seemed like a great time to start a program that would even more specifically help kids explore science and other topics through design projects. Following on the development of LICM’s previous well-received ‘Broken? Fix-it’ exhibit, it was a natural next step for the museum. This idea turned into the now widely popular Maker Mondays series launched this summer. The series seemed like a perfect project for Beth Ann Balalaos, who is an education major interning at the Museum through Adelphi’s Community Fellows program, to work on.
The goal of Maker Mondays is to engage kids through interactive, hands on, and fun projects. As the program progressed from week to week, staff participants, including Beth Ann, confirm that these activities have been very effective in sparking an interest in science with participants. The kids loved how they were able to apply what they just learned to an actual take away project. This helped kids conquer different concepts while having fun, while leaving room for creativity in their own design project. While doing the clay pot projects, all the kids who participated learned and applied the technique taught to make the pots, but finished projects looked different because of each child’s design choice.
As an education major, Beth Ann has been able to take a lot from the experience as she prepares to teach in the future. She’s gained an understanding of structuring the projects and activities as she researched and planned an activity for each week. Also, the experience of interacting with the kids directly proved valuable. She’s seen how kids need a more hands-on approach to learn effectively. She specifically loved the brush bot activity for this reason because she really saw kids learning through trial and error while they were troubleshooting problems with their bots. This interactive approach became the way that the staff of the program effectively held the interest of the participating visitors. “Kids are amazing in the way that they are just curious about everything,” Beth Ann noted. “It’s just a matter of capturing their attention and then keeping it.” This experience has given Beth Ann a new outlook on how to help kids learn in the classroom and is sure to be a valuable experience for her future teaching career. Catch the last Maker Monday of the year on 8/25 at 11 am.
Beth Ann Balalaos is a rising senior from Adelphi University. She is a psychology and elementary education major with a concentration in special education and a minor in gender studies. She will be receiving her master’s in education in 2016 through Adelphi’s STEP program. Currently, Beth Ann is interning in the education department at the Long Island Children’s Museum.
Long Island Children's Museum 