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Witte Museum - Arianna Xochitl Aguero, Week 1

 Witte Museum - Xochitl Aguero, Week One (July 9th-July 12th)

It is my first week here interning at the Witte Museum and I gained a lot of insight on what my museum has to offer for individuals and families. 

On Tuesday I got to meet with my supervisors and they gave me a breakdown of the Witte's security, guidelines, and history of the entire museum so that I am better prepared to inform guests. I was told that I would be spending most of my time at Witte Camp, which is a camp held during the summertime for kids ages 6-12 and it can get hectic during those times. My job will be to supervise and instruct the kids during the camps on the projects that they will be doing throughout the week as well as help create the projects that they will be doing. I had some free time at the end of the day to explore the museum and inform myself better about the museum's history, culture, and science. I got to learn more about San Antonio's Fiesta and saw beautiful gowns.

On Wednesday, I shadowed my supervisor and a Junior Volunteer (JV) on how to be a good camp staff. For the 6-8-year-olds in camp, they are focusing on "cooking up the past," where they make Texas food from the past and present and discover many traditions and techniques used to create these dishes. For the 9-12-year-olds in camp, they are focusing on "Engineer it," which focuses on projects on how to engineer in our everyday life while exploring different types of engineering at camp. Here the older kids can discover the skills needed to be a sophisticated engineer and I saw many of the kids problem-solving, working together, and using their imagination and the engineering design process to create an awesome robot using paper materials and a motor to make their robot move. 

On Thursday, I continued to help out at Camp and focused on helping the 8-12-year-old groups doing engineering projects. We started off with the day on creating biomimicry designs where we later went to go into one of Witte's galleries to explore different biomimicry designs in the wild. After that, I supervised the kids while they went to do a scavenger Hunt outside where they had a paper asking to find certain things in the wild and they had to take a picture of it. My favorite part of today was getting to meet the Witte's pet Tarantula named Paula who was super cute and very fuzzy. The kids also got to meet her during the Wild Gallery/Live Lab session which was really fun!

On Friday, I supervised and hung out with the kids in the morning while they were being checked in. We started the day with our last mini engineering challenge where they had to build a gumdrop structure strong enough to withstand three thick textbooks in order to pass as efficiently. After that, we did a gallery exploration on the second floor of the Witte Museum and got to visit the Fiesta Gallery which displayed beautiful dresses designed and worn during San Antonio's Fiesta tradition. After that, the kids got to make paper roller coasters and I got to help them make some incredible rollercoasters for all of them to play with. We then did balloon car racing, where the kids had to make a car out of a bottle, straws, bottle caps, chopsticks, and a balloon in order to make the car function and move. At the end of the day, the kids had free time to finish up any activity that they worked on throughout the week and I got to see all of the amazing engineering builds that they have done which was super cool.



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