First Day at Pre-School

At 70 I am feeling a little old to have my first day at Pre-School! LOL! For those of you that don’t know it I decided after I re-retired to volunteer at the local Pre-School which is just one block from my house. I had thought about volunteering at one of the Care Homes or the Senior Center. Although I have worked with Seniors in the past, I have worked with kids more. I always had at least one other job while I was a 911 operator and most of them were with At Risk kids. Since I enjoy my time with my Children’s Church kids I thought it made more sense for me to volunteer where I could work with kids. I talked to a friend who runs the Pre-School and she was thrilled to have someone help her.

I was a little intimidated for a while because I didn’t know the routine but once she assigned me a job and turned half the class over to me, I was fine. My job was teaching them to write their first and last names. This helped to me remember their names also. I previously knew only one of the students, he belongs to my church but is too young to be in my CC class, his older sister is there though. One of the little girls named Zillah kind of latched onto me. I think we will be great friends. She reminds me of Little Orphan Annie with the cutest curly hair. One of the little girls in my group is a special needs child but we did fine. Having worked with At Risk children this is right up my alley. We didn’t get to play outside because it rained all day so that made things a little more difficult as they were certainly rambunctious! LOL!  At the end of our session, Melissa told me that she couldn’t have done everything they did without my help. That made me feel good! I will work again Thursday but with the morning class this time. So I will get to know a whole new group of kiddies!

Since I wasn’t sure when I would get home, Don picked up the grandkids from school. I couldn’t figure out why he was so late getting them home but found out he drove them through the cemetery (!) and showed them where their great grandparents were buried. The school is right across the street from the cemetery but they had never been there before.

I found out that they don’t study history in school so one of these days I’m going to take them around our town and show them all the historic places here. Our county used to go from the middle of Kansas to the Colorado border so we have a lot of history here. Our beautiful city park was where the first settlers settled. Their first winter was so harsh that they were all near starvation. Because it was such a harsh winter the buffalo that grazed to the west had to come further east to get food. So the settlers were able to shoot enough of them out of their log cabin windows to have enough food to survive the winter. (Can you tell I love history?!?)