Posted on 8th October 2016
Hey everyone!
I’m Liv and I came from Germany eleven weeks ago for an internship with the Rediscovery Centre education team. During my internship I helped with preparing, improving and delivering workshops to children and teenagers. We taught them about biodiversity, waste and litter and also about different Science topics, like Space, Engineering or Maths. I have been to very beautiful libraries and schools with the education team and have met a lot of nice people all around Ireland. In my first few weeks I helped to deliver workshops as part of the summer camps in Dublin Zoo. In the middle of my internship I helped to deliver workshops for Heritage Week and now in my last week its Space week and Reuse month. As you can see I gained a lot of experience in education during my time here in Ireland and I enjoyed every moment of my work at the Rediscovery Centre.
But today I want to give you an impression of what other activities I have done as well. Everyone here is excited about moving into the Boiler House, so we have decided to have Make Days every Thursday and the education team goes there if we do not have to deliver workshops.
The idea of Make Days is that we reuse and upcycle old things for the boiler house to show what beautiful things can be made from old things which are normally thrown away. Each Make Day takes place in the Furniture Workshop on Shangan Road. These days usually start with an overview of all the things to be done on that day, for example one day we worked on mirror frames. We took the frames and decorated them with different materials found in our daily life at the Furniture, Bicycle, Fashion and Paint Workshops. I won’t tell what materials we have used but if you want to see them come to the Boiler House next year.
Another day involved sanding and stripping furniture. We got a lot of cafe chairs (like the one in the pictures below) and tables for reuse, but before we can do anything with them we needed to prepare them. So we took sand paper to prepare the chairs and we had a lot of these lovely chairs. When we had finished the chairs our new task was to prepare the tables. Preparing the table seems to be easy but believe me it wasn’t! Because we didn’t want them sanded down we stripped the old varnish. We had to do this several times until all the varnish was off the table. It took hours and was really hard work but we had a lot of fun with that hard work as well because we did it as a team.
I could tell you a lot more things we have done so far, but I don’t want to give any more hints other than what I have told you and these pictures of Make Days. Because I think it would be better to come to the Boiler House when it is open to the public and have a look at all the beautiful and genius things that were made during Make Days. It is totally worth it to come there even if it is just for a look, and if you ask, all the lovely people from Rediscovery Centre will show and tell you about all the beautiful things we have done.
My time here is over for now but I will definitely come back to see all the things in their place in the Boiler House.
Auf ein Wiedersehen im Boiler House. (See you in the Boiler House)
Liv from Germany
