I'm Still Here...

I just haven't been posting because this week has been busy. I'm volunteering at Miss Pink's school three days this week--today was the book fair, which I enjoyed because I love books. The kids are so cute. We had a kindergarten class and a second-grade class come in while I was there. The kindergarteners needed help writing down items on their "wish list" which they could take home to their parents. Almost all of them had at least 7 or 8 things, some lists totaling up to $30.00 or more. (Some of these were massive hardbacks or educational computer games--things that cost more.) Their poor parents! I give Miss Pink $10.00 and if she wants to buy anything else she has to use her allowance money. I'd love to buy every book in the place, but since I can't, she might as well get used to picking what she really wants. There's always the library!

And the second graders! They brought their money and boy, were they ready to SPEND. If they had any money left over, they spent it on pens and pencils and other small items until their money was gone. One girl kept asking if we had anything for 15 cents. Um, no. Her teacher said she'd already told them they didn't HAVE to spend all their money. But that wasn't the way they saw it.

I volunteered on Tuesday in a classroom and will go again tomorrow. Having been a teacher, I've been assigned to help give some extra reading skills practice to kids in this class. The teacher picks out two or three kids every week for me to work with. It's a nice little break for them to do something outside of class and I just enjoy hanging out with them (they're in third grade.) This week I'm going twice because their big statewide test, the dreaded TAKS, is next week, and they're reviewing for it. Yesterday they were in small groups, playing games that reviewed a particular skill. I hope they do well. The school as a whole has gotten an Exemplary rating for the past few years, and not because they "teach to the test" all year. The teachers are just really good, imo. I'm so happy Miss P is there. She's learning to write dialogue properly punctuated with commas and quotation marks!

The little bit of tutoring I've been doing makes me realize that I'd like to go back to working part-time doing that. I'm going to check into it for next year. Probably not at Miss P's school--they probably don't need that much extra help, but the district does hire part-time tutors and the pay is much better than subbing.

Only two more days left until the weekend (unless you count the rest of today, and I don't think we should!)