This past Sunday, Reading Buddies had an artsy moment. WE MADE BOOKMARKS! Yeah..who would have thought, bookmarks for Reading Buddies. But hey, it made a whole lot of sense. We had a lot of fun doing it too. We made a total of 64, and only two had repeated phrases, so if you think about it, we made 63 original bookmarks (with sayings and all). It was a tough task though...can you think of catchy, punny phrases for reading over and over again? It's kind of a challenge. The bookmarks were pretty large though, but it's okay since the books the kindergarteners read are about 8-10 inches in width, and a 12 inches in length, so I think we did a pretty good job. The volunteers had a lot of fun making them as well. While we were assembling the bookmarks, we shared stories about the kindergarten class we were reading to. We also found out that we were all reading to the same class...it was a surprise (no joke). It was really nice to see the volunteers sort of out their element, and just hanging out.
Then came Tuesday. Reading Buddies, whooo hoo. It was pretty exciting to bring all those bookmarks to that school (felt like Santa). The kids had no idea that we had gifts for them. It was a pretty busy day in the classroom though. It was not stop, shuffling kids to read to each of us individually. Sometimes the kids would scope us out to read to us.
Then the rewarding part came (magical spotlight) distributing the bookmarks. It was pretty cute. They had two lines, and we spread the majority of the bookmarks out so that they could choose which one they liked. Some knew right away which ones they wanted, others pondered, like it was a serious choice, "Do I go for the pink one with the surfing monkey, or the reading submarine...I mean...this could lead to my future choices of books....THIS CANNOT GO WRONG" ( okay. So they didn't really say that, but they sure made it feel that way).
All in all, reading buddies, it's still going strong, and I always look forward to what is going to happen in that program.
Sam
