Today I dressed like Where’s Wally…and enjoyed it!
The Primary School in which I volunteer had a sponsored ‘readathon’ and all of the year groups (Early Years included) had to try and read as many books as possible…possibly trying to beat each other in the amount of books read…basically you would read a book and then once you had finished you ring a bell to signify that another book had been read and then write the book title and author on the list for the class.
At the beginning of the day I was literally so confused, these children are four years old…how are we to complete a sponsored ‘readathon’ if the children can’t read? How wrong was I…of course they can read…and if not they just make the story up!
I had one little girl read the whole of ‘The Lion King’ to me based only on the pictures from the book…this made for incredibly interesting reading, never had I heard of Simba being licked by Hyenas or flown off into the distance by Zazu…well I guess there’s a first time for everything!
The other thing that shocked me about the day was how many books the 60 children got through between them…180…yes 180! There are 60 children over the three classes, but the idea for Early Years was that we would take a group of children and read to them rather than them reading to us.
One of the little boys in the class has Aspergers and his reading ability is far beyond that of any of the other children…I moved to sit next to him on a table as he was reading to himself and then ringing his hand bell, moving onto the next book…how sweet! It was only when I actually looked at the book that he was reading that I saw he was reading books with reasonably long words and sentences…this may not sound like much to you, but believe me, when I see a four year old reading a book aloud to themselves and using the word coincidence I am shocked…in a good way!
Most of the children in the Early Years din’t know who ‘Where’s Wally’ is as they are a bit young for him…however, when we went down to lunch the other children in the other years were really interested and wanted to know who made my hat (that would be me).
Overall I have had a lovely day (I always do in Early Years) and cannot wait to go back next week…i’m sure there will be some really lovely activities as it is the end of term! Yay!
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