Location: House Of The Good Shepherd
Date: Tuesday, April 28, 2015; 6:30-7:45 pm
It was a nice day and I arrived early, so stopped at a
coffee shop to get ‘Affogato’…because
that’s what you do when you have the time.
I then walked over to HGS and arrived just as Wilson was pulling into
the driveway. Marvin, who was leading,
was already here as were a couple of other volunteers. That was it.
The younger kids group did not have enough volunteers either and so we
couldn’t borrow from them. While we were
waiting, Marvin told us that there was a group of 4 kids who were new and they could
be a handful. He also mentioned that we
would go outdoors today as the weather was cooperating.
We went downstairs to see that the kids had already
assembled and were playing hide and seek.
They all knew Wilson and were excited to see him, asking when they could
see a movie. It seems like Wilson has
been showing them movies on my portable screen.
It was time for introductions and all of the kids gave us their name,
age and what they like to eat. One girl
said different fruits, other said vegetables, another said fruits. What was
this - A health show! Fortunately one
guy said pizza and then not to be outdone by others, he added a smoothie. Kids nowadays!
 |
| Our book for the evening |
The introductions were done and now it was time to pair
up. As usual, I wasn’t picked – though
one kid recognized me from last time since I read with him. Wilson was with two girls and so I joined
them, sitting under some contraption that looked like yoga mats! The girls were taking turns reading a book
called “The Day The Crayon’s Quit”, which
was about various crayon colors writing to a boy named ‘Duncan’, pleading to be his favorite color. It was fun to see the different colors like ‘Yellow’ and ‘Orange’ stating their case, claiming to be the colors of the
sun. One of the girls said that ‘Blue’ and ‘Pink’ were her favorite colors and so she wanted to read about those. When a page on ‘Pink; came, there were 4 characters on
it. One of them was a ‘Princess’, which she claimed as her
role; a ‘Dinosaur’, which was claimed
by the other girl; a ‘Cowboy’, that
was Wilson; and then a ‘Monster’,
which was me. Oh well, you accept the
part that’s offered to you.
The girls were doing a good job of reading and whenever a
difficult word would come up, I would pronounce it for them and also explain
its meaning; for example, “career”. We also played “spot the animal” in the pictures, during which I learned that one of the
girls did not like cats and dogs because they had the fleas! Soon the reading time was up and Marvin had
bought cookies and mango treats, which all the kids were excited to eat. We had initially thought of going out, but
Marvin said that it had cooled down a bit and so we would play indoor games
like “musical chairs”. We arranged the chairs and while everyone was
participating, I was appointed the “DJ”
and chose “Happy” from ‘Despicable Me’, having my back to the
game when the song was on. For the next
10 minutes we had a lot of fun with volunteers doing as well as the kids and
competing for the available chairs. In
fact, I joked that a female volunteer who was wearing high heels would probably
end up winning! But eventually a little
girl won and by now the time was up. It
had been a fantastic evening and the kids were wonderful. I even got some high-5s before leaving, which
is a win considering that I wasn’t even picked for the reading!
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