Volunteering. The first steps.

Well the week is nearly over. TGIF never rang so true. For three mornings this week, I’ve been volunteering at a local primary school, both in one-to-one reading sessions with the children and helping them to sort out their library. These three mornings have been followed straight by my usual eight hours at work. So I’m a little tired. Here’s an outline of my three morning sessions.

Day one: Reading with Year 1 Pupils.

Unfortunately I only managed to read with three, as they had school photographs that day and the whole school was then called to assembly. The three I read with were of a very high ability, so needed little help, however I found that they needed corrections occasionally when reading too fast and stumbling over words. Slow down were definitely the two words of the day. I was told they just really enjoy the attention being purely on them for ten minutes out of the day – which sounds awful, but children can really gain confidence away from their classmates. I tried my best to be encouraging and helpful for them. I’m looking forward to spending time with the struggling readers also, perhaps next week, to see what different challenges they’ll bring.

Day Two: In the Library

Sweet flip-flops that library was a mess. After being shown around by an older pupil yesterday I knew where everything was and a teacher set me up with everything I might need. I spent most of the morning just organising the shelves and putting everything back in the correct place. I added shelf markers for the non-fiction, so the children could find what they wanted quickly and easily and that was as far as I got. I emerged dusty and satisfied and tootled off to work.

Day Three: Back to the Library

Not wanting to be a hindrance to anybody, I just picked off where I left – in the library. This time completing a display I’d been asked to do yesterday, but had run out of time to start. For World Book Day (see the post about WBD at my workplace here) the children here had written book reviews. So I chose some neat-ish and colourful examples and did a BOOKS WE LOVE display. It received many admiring comments. I am a display queen. I then began to make my way through the books that needed to be added to the library system. The management system they use is actually the junior version of Eclipse, the library software we use at work, so I found it really easy to add books and so on. I completed a small pile before heading off to ‘real’ work. I even helped a little boy return a book at play time.

So all in all I feel I’ve been useful so far. I’ve tried my best to keep questions to a minimum as teachers are very busy people and just try to get on with whatever needs doing. I hope next week to carry on reading with the children a little more than I have this week. Maybe set up a permanent rota, so I am reading with the same years each time so the children get used to me.

And that’s that. I feel like this right now.

Sleepy time. For tomorrow we have our first Carnegie Shadowing book club meeting. Power on.

Over and out.