Thursday, October 15, 2009

Fair Enough!

Son, immediately on entering the house at 3.20pm: "Great, can we eat?"
Me, perplexed: "Why are you so hungry?"
Son, as if it's obvious: "Because I just spent seven hours in an elementary school!"


Ironically, in addition to a school-provided snack, a home-provided lunch, and a PTO-provided carmel apple (at the afternoon reading celebration), I figured it was indeed a fair comment. After all, I had only spent two hours in the same elementary school, and was ... hungry too. And pooped. People who spend all day in elementary schools but who are not themselves elementary school students: Kudos to you! Me, I'd have to keep pockets full of chocolate. But I had my first lovely session with a second grader (not my own) to begin story development with them for their young author stories they will write after the winter break. Forty five minutes flew by, and second grader number one has a map and story notes. Her story is going to be a hit!

2 comments:

  1. Are you volunteering, or ...? Cool!

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  2. Yeah, volunteering. Last year I helped as a reader, to get kids the requisite number of reading minutes to be able to attend the reading celebrations (! believe me, I know). This year, they have fortunately changed the guidelines, for which I do feel partly responsible, and the reading celebrations are more "comme il faut," and school-wide. So I volunteer in daughter's kindy class as a helper, and the second grade teacher has found a way to use me "as a writer." I met with second child today, actually one of the girls I read with last year when she was in first grade, and we spent 45 minutes getting her pre-writing/notes done. Since the kids won't actually write their stories until after winter break, I'm trying to get each of them to draw a picture/map to go with their notes, since I think they may "imprint" more of their memory of the story that way. Well, that's my theory...! We have a group called Youth Friends and they perform background checks so I can go into the school and work with kids this way. It's pretty cool.

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