This week is my last week working with Maker Jawn. After nearly a year and a half of spending my afternoons working with kids, developing projects, and being a part of an amazing team of creative, caring, and innovative Maker Mentors, it’s difficult to say goodbye not for a lack of interest, but for a lack of continued funding for… Read more →
Many of the teens in the Teen Center are passionate about gaming. At first glance video games appear to be the anti-book; the idea of 2-4 teens teaming up behind a glowing television screen to slaughter morphed and mutated humans is not exactly the picture of traditional literacy. However, even something as simple as informally chatting with a teen about… Read more →
A couple of weeks ago, I was catching my breath after a particularly hectic making session. I started to look around the room and consider the space I work in daily. It’s a semi-private room on the library floor, that is shared with the computer lab. There is a half wall that separates the… Read more →
At Maker Jawn, our primary MO is to make things. Obviously making things can be fun, but sometimes it includes steps that participants don’t like or understand. I’ve found that my students are extremely resistant to steps in the making process like sketching and prototyping. Being kids, and more specifically, kids who aren’t being taught much about creative thinking… Read more →
Yesterday Charity and I finished and submited her application for a Disney Friends for Change Grant. We had been working together over the past month to develop ideas for a small grant and ways to apply them through our Maker space in Kensington Library. After having an animal rights activist come speak at the library this summer, Charity… Read more →
Jason is a Maker extraordinaire at the KEN neighborhood library. He has been updating our tumblr blog since the summer so we invited him to write a blog post for the MakerJawn site. Here it is! On a chilly day in September 2012 a quiet, shy 16 year old boy reluctantly makes his way into the Kensington Library, he is unaware… Read more →
Have you ever thought about what educational resources you had available to you as a child? Aside from school, what else was there in your neighborhood that afforded you the ability to acquire knowledge? Maybe someone in a rural or rural-suburban area may have had plenty of time to run around outside and learn about the natural environment through self-directed… Read more →
