Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Inside Nan: Volunteer Tuesday

Today Travis and I worked on the vocabulary lists that the reading specialist put in the reading folder. There were four pages of words, today we did the first page of 68 words. Travis could read only eight of them. He read "peanut" for "pennant" and "college" for "cottage". He knew the words "promise" and "police" and "justice". We read the words and talked about the meaning and used it in a sentence. Here are a few examples in Travis's words: OFFICE - where police work, BAGGAGE - when you are at a restaurant and you leave they put your food in a baggage, SAVAGE - when you are really hungry, HOSTILE - where army people work, PRESTIGE - when you press papers down, FESTIVE - when you fasten a belt, COTTAGE - where people pick cotton, CONSTANT - when people bug you. When I explained the definition of MALICE to Travis, a desire to harm others or see others suffer, he said, "I have that." We talked a bit about anger and hurt and his feeling that the world isn't fair. How his auntie died in her 20s of some disease and his uncle was killed in a car crash and how he has anger about how life is. Our time was up right about then. He reminded me that his golden birthday is coming pretty soon, he will be 12 on May 12. The bell rang and he headed to his next class.

3 comments:

Jenn said...

Beautiful post. Brought tears to my eyes. Tears of empathy for this young man. And tears of gratitude for people like you who have not lost the gift of being present. Thanks for the inspiration.

Nan Hoekstra said...

Thank You Jenn. Would that I could inspire other adults to call the elementary or middle school closest to them and make themselves available to read with a child.

James Preller said...

You are my favorite person ever.

JP