Posts by Elaine Sohn

If you think of poems as flowers, then the Aguilar Poetry Fest was an exercise in charming cross-pollination. Sharing was the thing. Students were seated in groups of about 6, where they read their chosen poems to each other and then intermixed with other tables to multiply the fun. Poets included Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, Naomi Shihab Nye, Shel Silverstein, Douglas Florian (on Silverstein’s wavelength), Billy Collins, some haiku poets, and a smattering of others. 

After three months of writing letters back and forth, Aguilar Library students and CUNY's City Tech students met one another at the holiday pen pal party at City Tech on Wednesday, December 14, 2011. Students from both sites were excited to meet each other and find out more about their new friend! Traveling from 110th Street on the East Side, Aguilar Library students and their tutors made their visit a true learning experience by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset. They checked out the view, learned about the 130-year-old structure, and explored the Brooklyn Waterfront. And they even made a stop at Jacques Torres Chocolatier and Jane's Carousel in Brooklyn 

Students at Aguilar Library's Center for Reading and Writing are getting to know other students from around the city! They are pen pals with students in one ESOL evening class at CUNY's City Tech Adult Learning Center in Brooklyn.

Jay Klokker's students at City Tech introduced themselves to Aguilar Library's CRW students in short handwritten letters and within a week, Aguilar Library's CRW students had their replies out in the mail back to Brooklyn!

More than 20 pairs of pen pals look forward to their "mail," which is hand delivered by their teachers each week. Some topics discussed include: The Breadwinner, a book about a girl in 

Learning to write through photography is one of the goals of Sol Aramendi, a photographer/educator who is currently leading a nine week "Literacy through Photography" class at Aguilar Library's Center for Reading and Writing.

The Fall Cycle started at Aguilar Library's Center for Reading and Writing (CRW) on September 12, 2011! Thirty new students and six new tutors joined the excitement and will spend the next 12 weeks working together — reading, writing, and challenging themselves along the way.  

Better than vanilla ice cream! That’s what one student said in her reading at the Aguilar Center for Reading and Writing Learning Celebration on Thursday, December 8th. The student read her story about things she was thankful for—and the Aguilar CRW was right up there, better than vanilla ice cream. Other students shared their emotions about being a single parent and the responsibilities of bringing up a child without any help; about a dream finding $1 million dollars in a Swiss bank account; and even a story about fly fishing!

The NYPL's Centers for Reading and Writing have served thousands of New Yorkers over the years - making some adults genuinely literate for the first time in their lives and improving literacy skills for many others.

In every case, a volunteer did the "heavy lifting."

Harlem and Aguilar CRW students gathered at the Zora Neale Hurston Room of the Harlem Library on Friday May 28 for their debut as budding photographers of the CRWs of the NYPL. Students browsed the exhibit before guests arrived and were thrilled to see their photos mounted on the exhibit wall of the immense community room.

Students in the CRW Photography Workshop brought in objects which held personal significance for them. We spent some time writing about these objects and then went into the garden to take some portraits of each other posed with our special objects.

Students in the CRW Photography workshop browsed the Groana Melendez Family Work Series of portraits photographed in the Dominican Republic and in New York.  The exhibit is on the Mezannine of the Aguilar Library and can be seen there until September 7, 2010.  It is presented by En Foco's Touring Gallery which features presentations by emerging photographers in community spaces throughout New York City. En Foco's mission is to support the creation of work by photographers of diverse cultures, primarily US residents of Latino, African and Asian heritage, and makes their work visible to the art world and accessible to under-serviced communities.

A class field trip to El Museo del Barrio inspires the students' creativity.

In honor of Immigrant Heritage Week, students at 3 of the Centers for Reading and Writing spent the day at Mid-Manhattan Library recording their personal stories with Storycorps, a national oral history project, started 8 years ago. 

This past Friday, the group shared their dreams in front of the class. They shared dreams that they had during sleep, as well as those that they hope to achieve.

What a portrait can tell us?
by Judith Aisen

Billy said that portraits “portray” things about people and Keith said they give you a little history.  We shared written “portraits” of friends and relatives but some of our liveliest conversations were inspired by a film about the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who spoke about working quietly, like a cat, to capture people in their own habitat.  We talked about HC-B trying to, “put the camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.”

We brought in photos from our family album.  We observed the different attributes of a photo, such as setting, background, light and subject.  We wrote about the family photo and shared it with the class.  Photography lets us remember the good moments and brings us wonderful memories!

"Smile! I want to take your portrait...It's too dark over here.... Is this a stolen portrait?" were some of the comments heard on Friday, March 26 at the Aguilar Branch when adult students from Aguilar and Harlem Centers for Reading and Writing rose from their seats to show off what they had just learned about portraits: consider the mood, the setting, the lighting, the point of view and the subject!