High school students from around New York City work alongside museum staff to explore community, technology and education at CMOM. Through experiences that increase their confidence and independence, Junior Staff Interns grow into valued members of the CMOM team.

In the Spring, interns design an online children’s book and visit other museums around New York City.

As interns, we were given a task to write a children’s book. The inspiration behind the children’s book comes from the elements of CMOM’s Mission. The elements of CMOM’s mission are: Early Childhood Development, Creativity, World Culture, and Healthy Life Styles. We decided to focus more on Early Childhood Development, World Culture, and Healthy Life Styles because we felt that Creativity was interpreted by creating our books. In creating these books, we have learned to take on different challenges such as: thinking in a child’s state of mind; coming up with a concept that introduces the mission’s elements; and creating the illustrations with different collage materials.

-Fedna

Going to Staten Island Children’s Museum (SICM) was very different than the Children’s Museum Of Manhattan(CMOM) because the ride was very long. SICM also looks very different from CMOM. SICM seems to have all of their games life sized, while CMOM’s keeps everything regular sized. While we were at SICM, we played some getting to know you games to get groups acquainted with each other. Once everyone was out of their shell, we started a scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt questions were very creative because they were hands-on and they called for you to really get into the exhibit and move things around. Once the scavenger hunt was done, we came back together as one group and had an open discussion about our answers. We learned about each one of our museums.

- Zanquasha

El Museo del Barrio is a museum devoted entirely to Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American art. We went on “Super Sabado” which means Super Saturday. This visit was very significant because it was held on the Free Third Saturday of that month. This is a day-long event filled with free cultural programs. At El Museo del Barrio, we looked at exhibits which showed different types of art displaying the art work of many cultures. One of the exhibits we viewed was Phantom Sightings which is the first exhibition to focus on the work of Chicano artists since the mid-1990s. We also got the chance to participate in a hands-on project where we created our own maletas (suitcases).

- Phoebe