Friday, October 3, 2008

Outreach - After School Crickets

Went to the third site of the after school crickets program today and met with the site director. When I called him 3 or 4 weeks ago and left the message "Hi, I'm the new outreach coordinator and I'd like to the talk with you about the after school Cricket program that was planned 3 years ago but never executed," I got the impression that maybe he didn't remember much about it. Specifically, he didn't remember why he should spend any of his time working with me to get 8 measly hours of after school programs into his building.

After meeting with him today, he's talking about how to get more grants that could bring more of this and similar projects into his club. That tends to be the general reaction. People see this program and get very excited about the possibilities.

Oh, and did I mention the great idea I came up with for my longer classes? I wanted to give them a fun build-it-animate-it challenge but didn't want it to be the roller coasters again (too specific). I found an old idea on the Playful Invention and Exploration website: building a chain reaction based on a nursery rhyme, poem, or story.

I think this will be a great challenge. I immediately started searching for nursery rhymes and came up with about a dozen ideas of animated story scenes I could build. And it could be anything... they could animate a scene from Harry Potter if they want. The only requirement - use the Crickets to take a simple scene and animate it.

No comments: