Reading to the Class

Like I posted earlier, today is a holiday for me but not for my daughter.  When I realized this last week, I emailed her teacher to ask her whether it was alright for me to come eat lunch with her and then to read a story to the class afterward.  I have eaten lunch with her before, but I have not visited the class during a school day since school has started.  Vi was very excited.  Which is good for me because I can use it as a good behavior bargaining chip.  “Do you want me to come read a story to your class?  Well, that’s a special treat, and only little girls who behave well get special treats.”  Not that ever behaves terribly, but there are times when I would like for her to stop asking me to color with her already and let me watch Desperate Housewives. 

Since lunch is not an early morning event, I had no problem getting there on time, even a few minutes early so that I had plenty of time to read over in the car the story that I had chosen to read.  Ten Little Mummies written by Philip Yates, appropriate because of the nearness of Halloween and the fact that they are beginning to learn their numbers.  I had wanted to bring pictures of pyramids and the Sphinx and real mummies, maybe even pick up some little mummy toys at a store and use as a visual aid as we counted backward from 10, but thought that might be a little much. 

After I signed in (with the same secretary with whom I had signed Vi in late earlier that morning), I waited in the lobby for her class to come by. 

Her school has a contest to see which class reads the most books at home during a month.  We fill out our reading calendar religiously and have read around 100 books each month for the first two months.  Still, her class as a whole read less than 300 books each time.  I took a few minutes to walk down the hall where the library is located and where they have posted the amount of books each class read.  I am severely disappointed that about ten classes read more than her class read, one of the reasons I am there to read today.  I also have another plan to increase the amount of books the class reads, but that will be for another post.  The class that reads the most gets a blue ribbon where the number of books they read is posted outside the library.  It is Vi’s goal for her class to get a blue ribbon.  If I skip reading to her one night, she gets very upset.  She wins the prize for reading the most in her class every month, but she is determined for her entire class to win.  I’m helping her work on that, and I will post more about that later. 

So her class comes by, we eat lunch, blah, blah, blah, we go back to her class for the story.  Again, this is the first time I’ve been in this class during school time.  I’ve been before during orientation and when she got her report card.  And I’ve read to her class before when she was in preschool at the YMCA.  But I haven’t read to this class before, and I didn’t know exactly what to expect.  From what I’ve seen of the kids before, though, they seem like a pretty good group. 

And they were good.  They stayed as quiet as kindergarten kids can stay while I read the story, and after the story we talked about various things in the story and what everyone was going to dress as for Halloween.  Mrs. Teacher had stepped out to do some errands, and get a much needed break, most likely.  Those kids can talk!  And they don’t care who else is talking, because their story is the most interesting and the most important. 

When it was time to go, I stood up and looked toward my baby girl to give her a hug and tell her good-bye, and I watched as her face broke into several different pieces and fell all apart right there in the circle.  My poor baby!  She didn’t want me to go.  And I wanted to hug her and hold her and kiss her and take her with me.  But I hugged her and told her when I picked her up today, we would go to Books-A-Million to read and play with the toys and then maybe we would get some ice cream from Rooster’s (Bruster’s).  That still didn’t make her feel better, so I had to tell her that if she was going to cry when I left, I would not be able to come back to read to the class another time because it would disturb her whole class.  How I hated to tell her to stifle her emotions!  But I know she got over it quickly as she found something else to do with her friends when I left.  The same thing happened whenever I would take the morning off work once a month during the summer and take her to the summer reading program at the library.  When it came time to take her back to daycare and for me to go back to work, she would lose it, and I would have to tell her that if it was going to get her upset each time, I would not be able to take her to the reading program anymore because her going to daycare and learning with her friends was more important than going to have story time once a month.  But when I asked the preschool teacher whether she disturbed the class, she said she was fine right after I left because she found something to play with. 

So the reading went well.  It did not go as smoothly as I hoped it would because I have to get a feel for the kids and how best to handle them, but that will get better with practice and as we get used to each other because I plan to try to do it once a month or so.  How does this show my faults?  I don’t know.  I guess it’s not responsible to take time off from work to take my child to the library, or to put off the house cleaning that I feel I should be doing to go to my daughter’s school to read a book to the class.  But she learns that she is important to me, that school and reading are both important, and that having a government job is pretty nice.