Week 6: Piers Park

Hello again,
        6 weeks have gone by already? Summer is speeding by! This summer I have been working at Piers Park in East Boston. Even though Piers is the only site I have worked at, it is my favorite! Piers Park is a beautiful park and so family friendly! There is a brick path with healthy trees all around. There are benches underneath the trees, which is the best because it’s always so hot out. Lunch time is the one time we can cool off since we work on the dock that has zero shade, unless we’re inside the tiny wooden dock house. There’s a playground for the kids to play in with a enormous sprinkler for the kids to run through when it’s too hot outside.

        A week in the life at Piers is playing games, fishing, kayaking, lunchtime, then more fishing. When we first arrive a little before 9, we start to set everything up. We get all the materials and bring it down to the dock. We start baiting the fishing rods and put bait in both the crab and minnow traps. After that, from about 9:10-9:50 we play with the kids on the lawn. We play everyone’s it, knee tag, capture the flag, fishy fishy cross my ocean, and so much more!! When the games are over the kids go to the tent and grab their life jackets to go on the dock and start their fishing adventure! We fish until lunch which is at 11:30-12:30. The kids sometimes play in the park that has a huge sprinkler after lunch. We often teach them educational lessons every other day after lunch, then when we’re done, we head to the dock to fish again! My favorite activities to lead are definitely teaching them about the harbor! Their reactions to all the facts of the harbor and crabs are the best. We work with kids between the ages of 6-8.

        Piers Park has many interesting features. The most significant one is that the park is so clean. There is rarely trash on the ground of the park. There are only a few trash cans around, but there still is surprisingly no trash on the floors. One can tell the people of the East Boston community respect the park completely. The one unfortunate part about the park is the amount of plastic in the Harbor. There’s not a lot, but still it could be much better. The Harbor should be just as clean as the park!! The most common creature that the Piers Park gang encounters is the European Green Crab. We catch about two per day, on average. The Piers Park gang spreads environmental stewardship to the kids we teach because we teach them about how polluted the Harbor once was and how much cleaner it is today. We teach them about the effects about overfishing and what it can do to our harbor and why we can only take certain fish home. I hope to be able to teach the kids so much more before the summer is over!

        Talk to you later!
                Fatima Fontes