By Owen Reiter | For the Advance/SILive.com
Staten Island Museum hosts Earth Day How-To Festival: celebrates nature with community workshops (185 photos)
By Owen Reiter | For the Advance/SILive.com
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. [April 11, 2026] — Sunny skies and moderate temperatures greeted families who turned out for Staten Island Museum’s ‘Earth Day How-To Festival’ at Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden in Livingston on Saturday.
The four-hour event began at noon and featured hands-on workshops and presentations by local experts, hobbyists, and professionals. The indoor activities included how to identify invertebrates with the Staten Island Insectarium, how to draw birds with Jenya Frid, manager of education at the Staten Island Museum, how to make and fly your own kite with Staten Island Technical High School’s Robotics Team, how to sow and propagate native plant seeds with Alan Pieluszynski, ecological operations manager at Historic Richmond Town, how to identify and count trees for the Tree Census with NYC Parks and Recreation.
Among the outdoor activities, participants were able to go on a walk with the New York Mycological Society to find and identify mushrooms, learn how to be an ecologist with the Freshkills Park Alliance and AmeriCorps, and learn how to ride a bicycle with BikeNYC.
Rylee Eterginoso, Staten Island Museum’s director of curatorial affairs and programs, said, “Today was a great day for everyone to come together and celebrate the only world that we have, and have fun doing it.” “At the How-To Festival, we have upwards of 10 different activities, all designed to show you ways to enjoy and protect the natural world around us. From being able to identify what we’re looking at, whether that be invertebrates, mushrooms, or birds, sometimes you need an expert to guide you where to look, how to find them, and how to know what you’re looking at,” Eterginoso added.
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