Tag Archives: Hennigan

Old and New Faces at CYFK

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Round Two of City Year for Kids was a great experience for me because I was a team leader for many of the same fourth graders that I had met back during  CYFK in February. On the first day of the April vacation program at the Ohrenberger School, my old campers kept running up to me and saying, “Yay! I get to be in your group again!” and “Sarah, I missed you!” It was great finding out that I, though not I alone, had provided them such a positive and memorable camp during the school vacation. Immediately, they asked what our Arts and Crafts, Team Building, Recess, and other activities would be.

On top of recognizing several familiar faces, I had the opportunity to meet students who either had never been to CYFK before or who had attended CYFK at a site other than the Ohrenberger. Both the camp veterans and the new-comers became fast friends. They wrote and performed skits together in Performing Arts, pretended to be food critics in Downtime Games, called themselves “little scientists” in science lab, and the whole group cheered each other on during the Field Day competitive games on the last day.

Because we at City Year Boston run the CYFK vacation program for the kids, I decided to let my campers borrow my camera and capture their own memories. Their photos, in addition to the ones I took, show how much CYFK meant to them, as well as how much it meant to me.

This is a collage of pictures that the students and I took. From the top left going clockwise, you see me and CYFK triplets that attended the Ohrenberger camp, two close-up silly face photos, the campers dancing in line, an outdoors group photo on Field Day, and a shot of the campers with our group’s amazing external volunteer, Emily from the AmeriCorps program Leaps for Literacy.

Growing Perspective on Earth Day at the Hennigan

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Luke Watts of the CSX Team helps a teacher and student make a drum from recyclable materials.

Students and teachers at Hennigan Elementary celebrated Earth Day on Friday April 30 with a day filled with outdoor activities. With the help of EarthWorks, volunteers from Boston Cares, Simmons College and Playworks, and the City Year Boston CSX Team, students played games to help them understand the importance of protecting the environment.

First through fifth graders played predator vs. prey tag, pollination matching, and recycling hockey where they shot recyclables into three different goals marked “paper,” “plastic,” or “aluminum.” They also made musical instruments from discarded materials for a sing-a-long performance of “The Garden Song,” which goes “Inch by inch, row by row/Gonna make this garden grow,” …

The activity I ran for the duration of Earth Day was a Roots Relay Race. The game worked like a fire brigade. Students would stand in a line from a 10 foot tall tree to about 30 feet away. Representing a tree’s root, students passed cups of water and cards labeled with the names of nutrients from one person to the next until the person closest to the tree poured the water or placed the nutrient card onto the ground.

I think students learned a lot from Earth Day, while having fun. But I took away something from the day, as well, besides the fact that tree roots grow 2-3 times longer than the height of a tree. Throughout the day at the Roots Relay Race I saw every class in the entire school. And I realized I knew many more names and faces than just my students in after-school and my fifth graders in the three homerooms that rotate to my classroom for science, social studies, and/or reading. Even students that I didn’t remember meeting shouted out my name.

A student places a nutrient card on the base of tree during the Root Relay Race.

On Earth Day, I recalled hearing back in September that it’s important to always act as a role model to students because they’re always watching what behaviors you model. Also, the City Year story came to mind of how one good deed can cause a ripple effect of positive change. Well, I think I’ve thought of a new credo to describe my City Year experience. I’ve discovered that absorbing new experiences or extending your roots, allows you to grow as a person and then as you grow more you continue to expand your roots. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been aware of my personal growth, but seeing how many kids look up to me on Earth Day showed me the length and depth of my ties to the Hennigan.

City Year Boston Corps Member Starts ESL Class for Adults

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Sarah Harrington teaches a lesson to her morning ESL class.

As if working in a fourth grade classroom, helping run an after-school program, and serving as a team leader for the City Heroes program didn’t keep her busy enough, Sarah Harrington, of the CSX Hennigan Team in City Year Boston, decided to take on an extra project: teaching an English as a Second Language class for adults.

Sarah thought of starting an ESL class when she found out about City Year Boston’s Innovation Award. The Innovation Award is a grant of up to $1000, which corps members can use to plan a project to benefit Boston communities. Corps members can use their funding to host an event or start a program that falls outside of their regular service. But first they must submit a proposal with an estimated budget and go through an interview process.

Needless to say, the City Year Boston staff and the school where Sarah works were impressed with her idea to teach an English class to adults and she received the award.

Sarah’s free ESL class for beginners meets before school from 8:30-9:30am on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her students are the parents of the elementary school students that she and her teammates work with.

“I teach a lot of the same concepts [to my ESL students] that their children are learning in school,” Sarah says.

The content of her lessons include grammar, verb conjugation, and vocabulary building. Though the class only began meeting a few weeks ago, Sarah can tell that her students are learning a lot and are appreciative of her efforts.

Sarah, who joined City Year Boston after graduating from Hamilton College in 2008 and teaching ESL classes in Ecuador for a year, plans to pursue teaching as a career. She has applied to graduate programs and teaching residencies, but her teaching career already is off to a great start.

City Year Boston Corps Members Dance the Night Away!

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Corps Member Paul Willis from the CSX Team shows off his dance moves at the Hennigan School's Valentine's Day Dance.

Many potential adjectives come to mind when you think of a school dance. But if I had to choose one word to describe the Valentine’s Day Dance at the Hennigan School in Jamaica Plain yesterday night, I’d choose “FUN!!!” (Note the all capital letters and three exclamation points.)

City Year Boston corps members from the CSX Team, myself included, leant a hand and even showed off their dance moves to make sure the teachers, the students, and their families all had a great time. The DJ played music ranging from hip hop to salsa. The crowd also did classics like the “Cha Cha Slide” and the “Limbo.”

Stepping It Up at City Year Boston

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Liz Simpson helps two fifth graders with their homework in City Year's after-school program.

Liz Simpson applied to City Year Boston for several reasons she shares with other corps members; she wanted to give back to a community, work with children, and take time off between her undergraduate studies at Boston University and pursuing graduate work in education. Now at the midway point of her corps year, Liz realizes that her multifarious roles have allowed her to develop an invaluable lifelong skill: leadership.

As a teacher’s assistant in a fifth grade English classroom at the Hennigan Elementary, a mentor during lunch, and an after-school coordinator, Liz is a role model to her students. She reads over students’ essays, provides homework help, creates lesson plans, runs a cooking club in City Year’s after-school program, as well as gives students advice.

Besides positively impacting youth, she recently has taken a greater leadership role on her team. When aspects of Hennigan’s after-school program need to be tweaked, more experienced staff members at City Year mentored Liz. She has since led brainstorming sessions, made final decisions about unit lessons, and offered more support and feedback to her teammates.

“Through City Year, I have become more confident leading others, so I am more excited than ever about the prospects of the rest of the year for myself and my team,” Liz says.

Double Lunch Buddies in City Year Boston

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Sarah Addison (left) and Liz Simpson (right) sit with their two Monday lunch buddies (left center and right center).

Normally, “lunch buddies” is a half an hour one-on-one mentoring session between a corps member and a student. Once a week, they discuss such topics as honesty, leadership and positive and negative attention.

Well, my fellow corps member Liz Simpson and I decided to bring together our Monday “buddies” Josh* and Greg*, both fifth graders at Hennigan Elementary, for a double lunch session. Josh is in my social studies/science and reading classes, while Greg is in Liz’s English and reading classes. Because the fifth graders rotate classes, Liz also works Josh and I with Greg, so we decided all four of us should be lunch buddies.

Josh and Greg, who had never met before, are now friends and both rave about all four of us eating together every Monday. Josh liked lunch buddies before the merge because it “teaches you manners, new things, and after the lesson you get to talk about what you did [during the weekend].” Also, meeting at lunch is a “calm and gentle time instead of [chancing] getting into trouble at recess,” Josh says.

Greg adds and Josh agrees that with four people the conversations are “more exciting.” Moreover, you get to “share ideas, jokes…and tater tots,” Greg says.

CSX Team Hosts Teacher Appreciation Breakfast

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Teachers and Corps Members at Hennigan Elementary eat together at the Teacher Appreciation Breakfast

The City Year corps members from the CSX Team cooked breakfast to show their appreciation for the teachers at the Hennigan Elementary School on Tuesday December 8, 2009. The corps members arrived extra early, at 7:15 AM, to set up the school’s dance room and prepare all of the food. Thirty one teachers, including both the principal and vice principal, attended and helped themselves to pancakes, bacon, oatmeal, donuts, bagels and cream cheese, orange juice, coffee, tea, and hot chocolate.

The teachers and corps members had the opportunity to chat outside the classroom and get to know each other better. All ten corps members plus the team leader and the project manager briefly introduced themselves in front of the teachers before Paul Willis shared a jazzy poem entitled “The Earliest Bird,” which he wrote especially for the occasion. Everyone snapped along as he read:

The Earliest Bird

They say the earliest bird gets the worm
But even the earliest bird doesn’t see the teacher
The last to bed and first to rise, coffee drinker
Intelligence provider and seeker
This is my ode to the faithful, dedicated teacher

Master of the quick breakfast eater
Show up to work in order to defeat the
Miseducation, unqualified rumors
And prove the will of motivated and talented people
Will create academic tumors in the souls of students

The love of learning spreading
Never forgetting their roots
Because it’s the words of our teachers
That students hold on to

The red ink flowing, grading papers takes strength
They say every day is the present
And your presence is a gift.

Thanks to Taylor Matsalia and Oliver Locke, the Events Coordinators on the CSX Team, the breakfast was a great success in fostering a positive growing relationship between City Year and the school.

From Ecuador to the Hennigan

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Sarah Harrington helps a student in the Starfish Corps paint a pumpkin during the Hennigan Elementary School's Starfish Opening Day on November 10, 2009.

Meet Sarah Harrington, a City Year Boston corps member serving on the CSX Hennigan team in Jamaica Plain, MA. She might be assisting in a fourth grade classroom and preparing lessons for the City Year After-School Starfish program now, but she spent last year teaching English as a Foreign Language to students between ages twelve and forty in Rio Bamba, Ecuador.

After teaching abroad for a year, Sarah decided to do City Year Boston because she wants to earn a graduate degree in urban education and she figured being a corps member would be a good way “to get her feet wet.”

Since the first month of school, Sarah has determined that City Year is easier than teaching in Ecuador in some ways, but more difficult in others. Although she misses having her own class, she enjoys planning after-school and mentoring lessons in addition to assisting with academic lessons in the classroom.

Sarah’s highlight from the first day of school at the Hennigan was when her teacher exclaimed how excited she was to have another City Year in the classroom and how her teacher immediately gave her an involved role.