Photo Essay: Internship Photo Essay

What is Cherokee Point?
I intern at Cherokee Point Elementary. Cherokee Point Elementary is about 4 years old and located in City Heights. This new school has a total of 700 students, Kinder through fifth, 32 classrooms and stands on 6.7 acres of land. The new school was approved as Proposition MM November 3, 1998 and started being built March 25, 2004. The name Cherokee Point was given to the school due to the fact that the surrounding streets of the neighborhood area create the shape of an arrowhead. It was built to stop the overcrowding in the elementary schools nearby such as Adams Elementary, Birney Elementary, Carver Elementary, Clay Elementary and Central Elementary. The school officially opened September 6, 2005.


Beginning of my day
My main location , at Cherokee Point , is the library/media room. My job in the library/media room is to check books in and out, put books away, help kids find books, and some other tasks. I find putting the books away quite boring but sometimes fun. I find it boring because I have to put them back. This can take awhile but I do find it fun because I usually end up finding some cool books to look at. My favorite job to do is, to check books in and out. I find checking them in and out fun because I get to use the scanner and I get to interact with the kids more. I also enjoy helping the kids find their books because I, again, get to interact with the kids. When I don’t have anything to do, my mentors busy or I’m done with my work; I usually just grab a book from their large selection.

My Project
At Cherokee Point they have computer carts, which go between classes in the certain grade levels. The computer carts carry 20 Apple iBooks. Some teachers weren’t really happy with the movement of them because some weren’t getting the computers that often. The solution to this problem was to give two computers to each teacher from grades kinder to 3rd. For this redistributing of computers two computers carts, a total of 40 computers, and had to be distributed to 18 teachers. This was my project; I handled the computers over the two weeks, one computer cart for each week.


Beginning the project
When it came to redistributing the computers it wasn’t just getting them and pass them out. The first day starting my project I had to do software upgrades, Firefox upgrades, and Adobe Reader upgrades. For twenty computers this took me 2:30 hours. After computer upgrades I had to erase student files such as, word documents, Power Points, pictures, music, movies, etc. Erasing took me from about half an hour. After deleting the documents I had to install the printers so that the printer installed on the computer matched the printer in the classroom that it was going to this took me about 45 minutes. After I finished installing the printers I stopped working on them for the rest of the day and helped with other tasks.

End of the Project
The second day, my project involved entering the computer info onto a computer application called Horizon. With Horizon I assigned each computer a specific barcode number. This took me about 3 hours, due to the fact that I had to make sure that all information was right. After I was finished with barcodes I had to clean the computers so that they looked close to brand new. This took me from 11 to about 1. While I cleaned them I had to label them with their barcode so where the green dot is, is where the new barcode was placed. The third day was when I cleaned and labeled the chargers and passed out the chargers. This was the first computer cart on the first week. The next week I did finished in three days but I also did so much more besides this project.



Music Class
The second week I got to do more than just working in the library and with the computers. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I joined in on a music class and I also helped the music teacher out a bit. The days that I went there were different grade levels. Kindergarten, of course, was just simple dancing and singing, 3rd grade was practicing their recorder and some dancing and 5th grade was doing rehearsals for a program they have coming up. I enjoyed going to help out, observe and participate in music class especially with the kindergartens because they taught me some songs and dances. In the picture above I was sitting in on the third grade class taking pictures of them practicing their recorders, this is one of the pictures that I took. I also observed a first/second grade class in which I am basing my next project on. My next project is a combination of my honors project and my internship project. I will be creating a children’s book for this class.