You can take the teacher outta the classroom

Every Tuesday afternoon at 1:00, I spend an hour with Emily. She's a second grade student at a Title 1 elementary school here in the city where I live. I found this opportunity to volunteer on an elementary campus through the local branch of OASIS, a national organization that caters to the 50+ crowd, since they were looking for old mature folks to mentor/tutor children in low income populations. This is how I got partnered to work with Emily as a first grader last year. 

I truly believe I was called to be an educator. And I've honestly missed working with children since I left the classroom in 2015 for our second move to England. However, I haven't missed the paperwork, meetings and nights/weekends workload enough to return to teaching. If half or even 2/3 teaching jobs existed, I'd be all over that. And yet they don't, and so I get my teaching fix working with Emily. We read. We journal. We discuss. We watch short videos to help illustrate things we read about. Last week our video was prompted by information about pikas in our "Animals in Winter" book, and how they prepare for winter since they don't migrate or hibernate. We don't have pikas here in Texas, so Emily was at a loss. Thanks to the magic of the internet, we found a two minute video of yodeling pikas filmed in Colorado. She and I agreed they look like the cutest, big eared hamster-ish critters we had ever seen.

Over the course of the next two weeks, Emily and I will be exploring Egypt and its ancient wonders. I'm armed with a couple books, a Teachers Pay Teachers slide show on life in ancient Egypt and fun blow up globe. It's a little bit of history, geography and the wow factor of the pyramids all rolled into a couple mini-lessons.