As a teacher, I usually look forward to the summer and being able to relax and enjoy being off for a few months! The summer of 2013 was exciting yet different, I was transitioning from a teacher to an intern. From a professional that knows the ins and outs of my job to a student learning how to do the day to day of museum education. I had the privilege of working with the education department at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. I was excited to see how the education department incorporated STEM into their curriculum, and even more excited to observe and see how I could introduce art into a very science heavy organization. My first week on site was very much a learning process, I am an art minded person and was expected to assist in science camp classes. I actually found myself getting excited and learning along with the students! My internship experience will differ from many as I chose to be in a science museum to focus on cross curricular education. Because of those choice my experience was good and not so great at moments as well. I have learned so much about museum education and more importantly the benefits of teaching STEAM as opposed to STEM in education, which was my reason for taking this route. At the end of every week I decided to focus on what we call "sunshine and cloud" in elementary, basically a positive and a negative. My sunshine for the week is being able to observe some amazing educators and how science camp operates. I not only had a chance to learning the operations I also learned a lot more about science and how the process of experimenting can be very similar to the process of creating art! My cloud, however, is having to intern and assist even when an educator does not have appropriate classroom management and not feeling like I can step in to help manage the class. This makes me start to question the training of all museum educators, especially early childhood classroom management.
