3rd Visit

I was actually 15 minutes early today for my third visit! I had a bit of a panic in the morning however because my usual parking spot (on the side of the street) was occupied by another car, so I had to park in the school's parking lot. This scared me because the sign stated "School Personnel Only" I don't know if I am considered "school personnel" but I had no other choice but to park there because there were literally no other parking spots available.

Anyway, on my way to the school I heard on the radio that there had been a few bad car accidents on different highways, as I was glad that I wasn't caught in traffic, I quickly realized that most of my fellow volunteers were because when I reached the school there was only one other person there. We waited until about 9:35 before I received a text message from Kaitlyn telling me that she'd be a little late due to the traffic. The other volunteer and I went ahead to our designated "reading buddies" room and got ourselves situated. I picked out a new poem for the kids to work on this week which was "The itsy bitsy spider" (the kids loved it!) and informed the advisor I wouldn't be in the week of spring break, she told me to email her to remind her about it later. She also told me that the young boy that had arrived late to my group last week, was placed in a different group and I was now assigned a new girl, whose name was Jessica. Soon, the other volunteers were slowly trickling into the room and they too prepared their materials.

When I got to the classroom that I worked in last week, the usual teacher was no where to be found. In her place was another woman, I'm guessing she was the assistant teacher, but anyway, the other volunteer and I were waiting for about 5 minutes before we approached her and asked where our children were. She informed us that the children had to migrate to the classroom we were because they were in room 14. She said that it would take a few minutes and to just get our materials ready for they would be in shortly. I went to the table that I was at last week and picked out my six words for the "sight word game" when I was soon greeted by Tom and Cindy. They both ran up to me and gave me hugs (which made me break out into a huge smile). We sat down and I asked them how they were doing before we started our game. (Jessica was nowhere to be found). I told them that I brought feathers with me today and judging by how they acted the rest of the session, they must have really wanted those feathers because the school store would be open that Friday. They did very well on the sight word game, we flew on by, I only had to stop once to help Cindy make a sentece with the word "and". But other than that we had little interruptions. After our sightword game, the teacher of the classroom came in from whereever she had been and seemed like she was in a bad mood. She yelled at the children to get their things in order and told them to be quiet. This kind of caught me by surprise, because I wasn't expecting the teacher let alone expecting her to come in and yell at the students. I felt really bad for them, but it was not my place to say or do anything on their behalf.

After the sight word game we moved on to the poem, which again they loved. Cindy had problems with some of the words in the poem so I helped her get through it then I asked them some of the questions that we had on the back of the poem. We finished fairly quickly and I had enough time to go over a few of the identification exercises with them, and to my surprise, they loved this too! I think they got excited over the fact that we would be working on something else, although they didn't get the right answers right away, they worked hard with them. I think I will try to integrate these exercises more into the program because they needed some work on the I.D.'s and they seemed to have fun with them too.

After this, we still had about 3 minutes left, so I let them pick any of the sight words they wanted and make a sentence out of them. It was time to wrap up, so I asked them if they thought they deserved a feather. They both thought that they deserved them, and so did I so I gave them each one feather, this made them very happy especially with the school store opening on Friday. The kids begged me to come in the next day even though I've explained to them many times that I would only be able to see them on Tuesdays. Then they rushed back to their rooms in time for snacks.

When I got back to the classroom I stared my documentation process and wrote that they both improved their behavior alot. I marked that I gave them each a feather and told them that if they were good enough next week, I'd maybe give them two. When everyone else got back, we exchanged stories, and talked about how are kids were different/similar. I think that something that we all agreed on would be that the kids had lots of energy and it took a lot of work to keep them focused and entertained, usually the kids enjoyed the activities but got bored of them pretty fast.

After the proper documentation, I signed out at the main office before making my way back to RIC.