Already in Radio Camp, we’ve gotten a chance to be the host, the talent, the producer, the programmer… and now, we’ve also been engineers! Today, we built radios from scratch – just a few wires, some transistors, switches and BOOM – A Radio.

We did things a bit different today — our first block went to the radio station and did some recording. Some of our second graders got a chance to be the DJ just the way that Mr. Larry showed us how yesterday! Our fourth graders did some recordings with Miss Sarah (see below).

During second block, we talked about what a programmer does on the radio. We talked about what content goes on the radio, and then put together our own hour by drawing a pie chart! We also got to see the middle-schoolers from Art Activism rehearse for their peace rally tomorrow. Best of luck to them!

What a fun and informative day we had today! We went over to the Children’s Museum where we interviewed Larry Berger, host of The Saturday Light Brigade radio program for the past 37 years. We got a chance to ask him about how he started SLB, how the studio worked, and all the other questions we came up with yesterday. He gave us some great answers and taught us a lot about the studio, the radio program, and what it takes to be a DJ. Thanks, Mister Larry!

This is RADIO WEEK – we’re going to do a whole lot of learning and fun activities around what radio actually is! We went back to the studio today to talk about what we know so far: we certainly know how to use microphones well, as we all demonstrated beautifully. We also know about tuning a radio, different platforms radio can come on (digital, satellite, AM/FM), and a lot more about being in an actual broadcast studio now that we’ve been to Radio Camp!

Tomorrow, we’ll be interviewing Larry Berger, host of The Saturday Light Brigade, so today we came up with a few questions that we want to ask. Our questions were FANTASTIC. We are curious about how he got started, how the studio was built and how it works, what being a DJ (and executive director of a non-profit radio station) is like, how content is chosen, and much more. We can’t wait to ask Mr. Larry all these questions ourselves!