Tag Archives: kids

Maine Life, Personal Growth

When I Was Their Age…

Leave a comment

I was going to start this by wondering if you could stand another post about dictionaries… and then I realized, it really isn’t! The background is that I recently wrote an article for The Dictionary Project Newsletter and have had several nice comments on it. It was some of the comments that made me realize I didn’t just write about dictionaries–I wrote about the relationship between schools, volunteers, teachers, students, parents–that wonderful conglomeration of people who make up the community.

And in a strange irony, I had a short but wonderful conversation today with a third grader who recognized how a quilt is like a community… you find lots of different things and put them all together to form a pattern that is both many things and one thing.  It also ends up being quite colorful and pleasing to the eye.

So in a larger sense, I wrote about communities and expectations and communication and working together. To see if you agree, check out “When I Was There Their Age…”

Okay… now how bad is that? They’re are differences between there, their and they’re! And I really do know what they are!  Technology got me on this one… because I made the mistake, saw the mistake… but the automatic send happened before I could edit out the mistake! So there’s another advantage of subscribing to this… the odds of seeing my mistakes are higher! (For those who didn’t get the emailed version, I made the mistake in the title too.)

Learning, Personal Growth, Teaching

Grab Some Tissues…

Leave a comment

And watch this video. Please.

http://www.flickspire.com/m/HPP/MakeADifference

All the way to the end. I’m not going to do a spoiler, but I will tell you that part-way through I found myself thinking how hard I wished people could realize that it doesn’t take much to make a huge difference in a child’s life. But in the end, that wasn’t the point.

Learning, Personal Growth, Teaching

Problem-solving With Kids

1 Comment

Many regular readers know that I spend quite a bit of time with the kids at school… mostly as a “bookworm” meaning second and third graders get turns reading their favorite books to me. We have a lot of fun and I like to think it encourages a love of reading.  I know I enjoy their friendship and they teach me a lot.

During a recent visit a gaggle of third grade girls cornered me to announce “We have a bullying problem.” Now unless you live under a rock you know that bullying is something taken very seriously at school–volunteers are obligated to report incidents to teachers. I somewhat surprised myself when I responded by asking them, “What have you done about it?”

I was not that surprised when they gave me a fair amount of detail regarding the perpetrator, who’d they’d reported it to, and what the plan was for dealing with it. I am convinced that we often fail as adults by underestimating kids. The situation was well in hand; they just wanted me to know.

My conversation with them reminded me of an event some years ago. I was at my then chiropractor’s office and discovered that Amanda had come to work with her mom due to an accident at school the previous day. She and Tyler, another first grader, collided while playing kick ball.

She was busy managing multiple priorities: being a kid, greeting and visiting patients, entertaining herself, saying “out of the way,” creating art, practicing writing her name, and negotiating more time off rom school with her mom. I considered myself fortunate that she found time in her busy schedule to play with me. Actually, that’s not quite right. She let me play with her.

I found it difficult to “write my name” using those perfectly shaped first grade  letters. But every time I “goofed up” Amanda assured me I was doing fine. She also thought I could draw a pretty good cat.

We of course discussed her accident. When I asked her how she was going to avoid getting hurt again she didn’t hesitate with her answer. She would make sure her and Tyler were on the same team so they were always running in the same direction.

I left clutching the drawing Amanda did for me. (She drew pretty good flowers.) It still hangs in my office as a reminder of the fun we had and the fact that sometimes kids are great problem solvers. Adults are the ones who make things difficult.

 

By my estimation, Amanda is now in her early twenties. I’m sorry I’ve lost touch with her and her Mom… but I hope she’s still drawing flowers!