Thursday Exhaustion!

This morning I went for a 30 minute walk. I decided that since I planned to walk to the school for the first day of the reading-with-a-child program, it wouldn’t hurt to walk almost there and time myself. Ten minutes from my house up the back roads and I am at the school. So, I turned around and walked the long way home.

At 11:40, I started up to the school again and all went well except that I forgot which entrance I was supposed to go in. I was rescued by a young lady who directed me through the high school to the elementary school. When I got there, Martha said the Nicholas’s teacher had asked that I go and pick him up the first time so she could meet me. So, off I went again wandering around the elementary school. I did eventually find them both and I got to meet Nick, which is what he prefers to be called.

He is an articulate and sociable 4th grader who already had a Hardy Boys book he was reading. I went into the lunch room with him and ate my apple while he messed around with one of the prepacked lunches one can buy in the grocery store. I would say his mother wasted her money because he ate a minute amount. I had eaten a late breakfast so I had an apple. We went back to the library.

Matha had said that I would do better at letting the kid take the lead so, although I despise the Hardy Boys books, I asked him to tell me about the characters because I wasn’t familiar with the book. He did an excellent job of explaining what was going on and he decided he would read first. I have taught seventh graders who didn’t read as well as this fourth grader. At the end of the first two pages, he told me it was my turn, so I read the next two pages. There was a sentence that mentioned one of the characters checking things out when he was supposed to be asleep and I saw Nick smiling at that point. I asked him what was funny and he said it reminded him of when he did that at night when his father came up to check on him and he was supposed to be asleep like the character in the book. Now, one of the things I tried to teach the seventh graders was to relate the books they were reading to their own lives and here is this 10 year old empathizing with a character…

We took a break from reading and discussed our favorite books and I was telling him about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis which is one of my favorites. Apparently he had read part of an easier version for young children called What Lucy Finds in the Wardrobe  and we got Martha to find it for him for next week. I asked her to find a copy of the original book too because he might enjoy having a harder book read to him. So, we shall see. He is a very well-brought-up boy because he thanked me for coming, said he had a good time and was looking forward to next week! I am looking forward to next week, too. I walked him back to his room and then I went back to the lobby to sign out. That was when I discovered that somewhere in my perambulations around the school, I had lost my favorite black turtle-fur ear warmers! Martha said she would check Lost and Found for me.

So, I got home just in time to take the fresh loaf out of the bread machine and I had a cheese sandwich, some salad and some yogurt for lunch. Then it was time to head out and around the corner to the library to do my second hour this week with Robin.

One good thing about working with an adult is that this person is able to tell me what she needs help with. She gave me two pieces of writing where she had summarized two different articles and on the whole, she had done a pretty good job. Her weakness is that she does not have the mechanical skills. I went through it for her showing her where she had, for example, a singular subject but then she uses a plural pronoun. She can’t find this kind of thing for herself. Then we moved on to the grammar stuff again, and again, she wasn’t too bad. Next week I will give her some more practice she can be working on by herself and an answer sheet so she can see what she got right and a tally of what she had trouble with. Today, for example, she obviously hadn’t reviewed the list of common prepositions I gave her. I have a lot of sympathy for her. She works very hard but does not have the necessary skills to do this kind of thing easily by herself.

I am exhausted! Next week, on Tuesday, I am going to see if I can do Robin’s second tuition class  on Friday rather than Thursday.

Until later…