…with all kinds of particular places to go! (My attempt to parody, badly, Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go”).
This week, I actually went two places in southwestern Washington on two separate days: Camp Wannaread through the Youth and Family Link program in Kelso, WA and ROOF Community Services in Rochester, WA, both connections I got through the inspiring Page Ahead, the likeminded organization that is letting us park the Lit Lab at their office. Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, I could have combined them into one day since they are both pretty much right off the main North/South highway from Seattle, but one of the big challenges I’m coming to recognize with the Literacy Lab is scheduling. It is all about calculations and cooperation. Calculations to make sure I can actually make it to a storytime and back and cooperation with the local agency to work around their schedule as well. I was scheduled to do a third storytime this week and realized (thankfully the day before, but ideally it should have been sooner) that to attend a morning work meeting, drive an hour and fifty minutes out, do a storytime, drive an hour and fifty minutes back, and make it back to class by 4pm was actually not possible.
Which brings me to my first storytime and another lesson: to make sure that I have the correct address of the location. Tuesday morning had already not started out well because I took the half-hour bus ride to where the Literacy Lab is parked, only to realize that I had forgotten the van keys at home (for hopefully my first and last time!). A little panicky because in order to arrive at the time I had arranged with Camp Wannaread I needed to leave within a half hour and yet the round-trip bus adventure to pick up the keys would be more than an hour, I called my wonderful, amazing fiancee who had not left for work yet and begged him to drive out of his way to drop the keys. (Which he did, with nary a complaint or guilt-shaming look!). The drive was uneventful until I arrived, a little late, to Youth and Family Link at the address I had. Except, oops! Camp Wannaread was actually being held at an elementary school. I found it, rushed in breathless, and luckily, since it is a camp with a regular schedule, did not keep them waiting too long. I performed the water storytime again, but added a storytelling component to one of the stories that I had learned in an amazing workshop for educators called Bringing Theatre into the Classroom. What’s fun about doing the same theme more than once is how it gets adapted. In this case, the children were about 15 students in elementary grades. While upper elementary school students do not bring the same sense of amazement and wonder as preschoolers at, for example, an activity mixing oil and water and food coloring, their level of engagement is deeper and they ask more probing questions, which I found thrilling. Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of the storytime or children.
But I do from the following day’s storytime! The storytime at ROOF Community Services was the biggest crowd I’ve had and also the widest age range: there were probably about 35 students ranging across the elementary grades. While some of the students (particularly the older ones) hung back at first, by the end, I had about half of them “on stage” performing “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Shell” using various props and had students really curious about the science behind the oil and water experiment.\
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