visit 6

Visit Number 6

Today was my sixth visit to the Sunnyvale Trailer Park. I walked in today knowing it was going to be a good day. When I pulled into the parking lot I noticed some spray paint tagged on the school building. Upon seeing this I was kind of disappointed that someone doesn’t have enough respect to keep their vulgar gang signs and symbols away from places designated for young children. I brushed it off and followed my usual routine of stopping in to say hello to Mr. Lahey and Randy like every other morning. I brought up how I had just seen the spray paint on the side of the building and we all went out and looked at it. We talked about what a shame it was that these thugs didn’t have enough respect to keep their garbage off of the school grounds. They thanked me for pointing it out and they told me they were going to talk to the custodians about having it removed. I just hoped the kids didn’t see it and think it was something cool and that they wanted to be a part of it. I then stopped in to talk to Mrs. Peterson real quick and she handed me a handful of new material for the kids, and thanked for me taking the time to come request new stuff at the request of the students. I was very excited to get to my trailer and get right to work on these new materials. As I entered the trailer I was greeted with the usual hellos and requests to join my group and I made my way over to Barbs desk. We talked about keeping the kids away from the side of the building with the spray paint and also how I had new activities for the kids to do. Barb told me she actually had something important to tell me and let me know the Lucy had gotten herself back on grades with the rest of the class and no longer needed to be in the group. When I began walking over to her desk, Lucy noticed I was there and jumped up, ran over and threw her arms around me hugging and thanking me a thousand times. I told her I was very proud of her for working so hard and handed her a handful of stickers. As I sat down to get to work with Ricky, Julian, and Sara Barb brought over a student who we’ll call J-Rock. J rock was the other white child in the classroom and he was very shy. I introduced myself and told him we were looking forward to having him work with us. We jumped right into a fluency activity that dealt with a lot of reading. This lesson was a level harder than ones we had previously worked on and we had plenty of mistakes to correct. After about twenty minutes the kids learned the materials and we were making it through without any mistakes. We moved on to the next activity which dealt with blends again. We worked on similar words but with different things to do which really helped the kids learn better. Forty five minutes after working with the first group it was time to move on to the next group. Ricky, Julian, Lucy all looked sad and moaned as they headed back to their seats and I told J-rock it very nice to meet him. He smiled shyly and then headed back to his desk. I then called up the second group of kids who all came running. We ran into similar mistakes as the first group and it took just a little bit longer to get through the stuff. However on the second activity we moved faster than the first group and we were able to move onto a third activity that dealt with sight words. The kids were all sad to see me go, and it was another great successful day.