August 30: My (third) First Day as a Kindergarten Volunteer

Sammy the Seal, colored, cut and pasted by Griffin

Monday marked my return to  Room 21 as a volunteer.  Mr Swanson was all business right from the start and I felt a bit like an imbecile as I tried to retain the details of the tasks I was given.  First stop, the copy room.  I am pretty sure that this is the same copier that was there 7 years ago when Aidan was in kindergarten.  I always assumed that they had a much shorter lifespan.  Fortunately, I have since overcome my fears around asking for help and I stepped right up to the only other person in the room and asked her for a refresher course on the hulking machine.  After several paper jams and much opening and closing of various doors on the machine, I was moving forward.  25 copies of the calendar, 30 copies of the "S" worksheet, cut in half and paper clipped. 50 copies of the wobbly hand-drawn stars on yellow card stock.  Problems.  The machine seemed determined to shoot the card stock out at violent angles, crushing one corner of the sheet, although leaving the whole thing usable overall.  Nevertheless, I did not have time to make 50 copies one at a time, which was the only way it would cooperate.  I had to be back in the classroom in 5 minutes and now there was someone else behind me waiting to use the copier.  I gritted my teeth and went off in search of help again.  This time, with the card stock in a different paper tray, my luck was better.  Managed to get all tasks completed while wasting only a ream or two of paper!

Next, I got to be the "teacher" at one of the three work stations in the room along with Mr Swanson and his teammate, Mrs Taylor.  They did the heavy lifting - the repeated writing of the capital "I" and the circling of things that start with "S."  I got to help the kids make a puppet of Sammy the Seal then set them up to write their names 4 times in a row.  Sounds easy, yes.  The first group went pretty well.  Most kids stayed on task with the coloring in of Sammy and most chose conventional colors.  The cutting was pretty good, too.  I only had to help one or two kids with the scissors - "Move the paper, not the scissors" being a mantra of the class.  "Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy" is another mantra!  Most kids in this group could write their names, even Oliver put off the temptation of the puzzle table long enough to write his name 4 times.  Group 2, things got a little sketchier.  Not so good at staying on task, even worse at cutting.  But, only one kid actually cut Sammy's head off.  They needed quite a bit of help with the names, though.  I did a lot of writing in a light color and having them trace over.  Many of them did not grasp this concept and went on to write their names NEXT TO the one they were supposed to copy.  Some kids, and this is why I love kids, wrote their names in their own made up language next to the names I had copied out.  Third group was close to mayhem.  They needed lots of encouragement and nudging along, but they made it in the end.  Serenity.  Maytee.  Ronley.  Brooklyn.  Guadalupe.  Some stand out names in this bunch.

Next the kids had recess.  After recess, Mr Swanson started reading the kids a giant book about dinosaurs.  A page into it one of the kids asked to go to the bathroom, which is inside of the classroom (one for boys, one for girls.)  Once that kid was up off his carpet square, the chorus followed, "I need to go to the bathroom!"  "I have to go potty!"  "Teacher, I have to go!"  "I have to go poop!" and so on.  There was a little rhyme about remembering to use the bathroom at recess and most of the kids were put off their ideas of urination for the moment.  Then half of the class, including Griffin, went out for PE and Mr Swanson worked with the other half on dinosaur graphing.  I had the pleasure of ripping six different pages out of 50 workbooks and sorting them.  Then I did some pasting of calendars onto construction paper and the next thing I knew it was play time.  The kids got out the Lincoln Logs, the dolls, the wooden trains, the dress up clothes, the blocks and the fairy treehouse.  Interestingly enough, there were mostly boys crowded around the fairy house and Griffin sat himself down in front of a bucket of little plastic houses shaped like mushrooms and other things and played with the little doll creatures, and a few girls, who were also there.  When I was done, I headed over to the Lincoln Logs where Jesse was playing by himself.  He had a big scab on his face and I had been teasing him earlier about how he got it - did he crash the car he was driving, was he skateboarding?  I didn't realize until after that he didn't speak English, although I THINK he understands a lot.  So, I started talking to him in my toddler-ese Spanishlish - "Este es grande, este es pequeno.  Este es una case grande."  "Who lives en la casa?  Un gato?  Como se dice este - un perro?  Y este?  Como se dice?  Aha!  Una caballo!  Que bueno!"  It was actually pretty cool, although it confirmed in me the belief that I should never speak a foreign language with anyone over the age of 6.

Then it was time to go home.  I didn't intent to spend the whole 3 1/2 hours there, but I'm pretty glad I did.  While I certainly could have used the alone time to write reviews for my blog, it was really a good feeling to give attention to those kids.