As a nature story teller at Harvard Museum of Nature and Science, I read nature and culture themed picture books to families visiting the museum during the weekends. I used stuffed animals, specimen, models, and cultural artifacts to aid kids’ understanding of the stories and also to attract their attention in the reading. We sometimes even performed as the characters in the stories to have more fun in this learning process. Usually after the reading, we would make arts together according to the story theme, for example, after reading a story about autumn together, we made collages using foliage, acorns, flowers we collected in the nature. Sometimes after the reading, we would also explore the related galleries together and try to find the animals mentioned in the stories and acknowledge their scale as well as characters in person.
Besides story-telling, I was involved in the preparation and execution of the Day of Dead Festival in 2018, in which we made paper flowers, sugar skulls, and face-painting with families in the neighborhood. I also participated in the preparation of the Science Festival in 2019, in which I helped kids creating and making their own buttons to show their understanding of culture and science using the button machine.
SIYAO LYU 