During February and April school breaks, 826 Boston hosts free creative workshops. These workshops allow us to help transform a regular school break into five days of action-packed, imagination-filled adventures. This year, we pulled out all of the stops, hosting some exciting collaborations and exploring some truly innovative and funky approaches to writing and creativity.
All week, students filled our Egleston Square center with their impressive, far-out, and expansive characters, stories, questions, and propositions. Students experimented with genres like comics and horror fiction. Our friends from the Museum of Science Traveling Programs transformed our center into a lab, helping students design and launch their own rockets and take imaginary, out-of-this-world, space journeys. Paloma Valenzuela, creator of the award-winning web series “The Pineapple Diaries,” a Boston-based, Latina-centered comedy, demonstrated how to develop a character and write monologues that tell funny, endearing, universal, and relatable stories. Students ages 9 through 11 were senators for the day at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, crafting and sharing speeches on what they care most about and the changes they want to see in the world. MIT Media Lab researchers shared adventures in developing the StoryBlocks app, which allows students to create a comic-style story. In the workshop “Dear Reader: Texts, Tweets, Letters, and Other Life Updates”, students explored modern-day epistolaries (stories written in the form of letters) using text messages and tweets to create stories. Students spent the whole day gathering inspiration for imaginative stories, observing their senses, surroundings, and actions at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston where they swung on hoops, crawled in tight spaces, and bent their bodies at William Forsythe’s interactive exhibition Choreographic Objects.
If you are interested in supporting 826 Boston’s vacation workshops and other programming as a volunteer, check out our listings here.
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