Once Upon a Punch Clock…
One day during my shift at Costco Wholesale in Windsor I was standing at the punch in clock. As I stood there literally watching seconds to minutes pass my eyes begun to wander to the posters on the wall. Half buried behind brightly coloured paper there was this little white paper that read Reading Prog… I dug it out to see the whole title that read Costco’s Reading Program. This was my first introduction to this long-standing program. I signed up and waited for the details. After a couple months I found out that we would start on the last Wednesday in January and continue from there for 10 weeks at Begley Public School. On that first Wednesday I was nervous I did not feel I was qualified enough to take this on yet I felt that I could help. After the first break bell, we waited for our students to come down to the conference room. We had been given a tool kit that contained two task books, paper, a pencil with eraser, and six wooden blocks (that I now know are called manipulatives). Each week I would work with my student one different reading tasks whether it was pronunciation, how to sound out words or just fluency in their reading. They were already a bright kid but I started to notice as the weeks past their reading was becoming more smooth. They started to have fewer pauses to ask what words were instead they skipped into sounding them out to figure them out. Our weekly hour flew by so quickly that it felt like we had just gotten started. This experience did not prepare for the world I was about to enter in, in teacher’s college. However, it did remind why I want to do this.