Learning Literacy through FILM at Cathedral Hill
March 17, 2010
The Camp Fire club at Cathedral Hill Homes in St. Paul meets once a week and provides an important outlet for the youth that live in this housing community.
Like other CommonBond sites where Camp Fire has partnerships, Cathedral Hill Homes offers daily youth programming in its Advantage Center. Most of this programming is built around offering youth structured homework time and other important academic support. Camp Fire Wednesdays give Cathedral Hill kids a chance to participate in fun games and enrichment activities in a group setting, building new skills and engaging in different kinds of learning in a way that supplements their academic work during the rest of the week.
This year, Cathedral Hill is a pilot site for an exciting new curriculum called FILM (Finding Inspiration in Literature and Movies). AmeriCorps VISTAs at Camp Fire have been working to develop this curriculum for use at all Camp Fire club sites. Youth at Cathedral Hill have enjoyed participating in FILM projects that engage them in reading multicultural picture books, drawing superhero comics, writing riddles, playing vocabulary match games and doing other fun and engaging literacy-building activities.
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The FILM curriculum is a project of Camp Fire's AmeriCorps VISTA, Eva Cohen. VISTA, which stands for Volunteers in Service to America, is an AmeriCorps program with the overarching objective of combating poverty in America. Camp Fire has had VISTA members for the past three years through the City of St. Paul's VISTA program. This program focuses on enhancing afterschool programming for youth in St. Paul in order to improve educational outcomes for low-income youth. At Camp Fire, Eva has developed the FILM curriculum for use at multi-age programming sites.
Currently, youth at Cathedral Hill are watching short sections from the film August Rush. This section of the FILM curriculum focuses on the importance of music in the movie and youths' own lives. During a recent August Rush-themed club session, Eva brought in local rap artists MC Harv and Truthbetold to perform for youth and conduct a rap-based writing workshop. "Club members were thrilled to have the opportunity to meet real professional musicians and do creative work alongside them," Eva said.
According to club member Raphael, Camp Fire is, in a word, "Fun." At Camp Fire, he says, "you learn a lot. You can do lots of things. You're really in a group." Club member Khadra says that she has lots of fun playing all the games.
Camp Fire is lucky to have strongly supportive partners at Cathedral Hill. Program manager Matt Valerius and AmeriCorps staff Brandon Boat are always present and engaged in activities along with youth during Camp Fire time, bringing an energy and sense of humor that's contagious. Brandon jokes that "My biggest complaint [about Camp Fire] is that the kids have too much fun."
