The Go Project is an organization that tutors children that are behind in school. They tutor over 600 children across four sites. The started out tutoring 15 children of whom they would drive around and collect for tutoring. They have since grown to help children 1st-5th grade.
We arrived in the morning to have a brief discussion with the other one day volunteers. We then went to the auditorium where the kids slowly trickled in. There were two classes for each grade. Elisabeth and I were placed in 4b. Oliver and Aditya were placed in 5b. We then all were given riddles to solved. This brought the kids together and helped them have a good time. After this, we all filed up to our separate class rooms. My class was sent to a 3rd grade room where we sat around a carpet for morning meeting. A child named Alyssa
read off days schedule people asked questions.
We moved on to working on a reading activity in which the teacher hung up a short story about two sisters who were refugees and the class highlighting each sentence either pink or green. Pink if the sentence was a very important piece of information and green if it was unnecessary. Then, each kid was given a index card saying “the word refugee is a(n) _______” then there were four options, verb, noun, adjective and adverb. One girl at my table named Angeline wanted help reading the question. She also wanted me to define verb, noun, adjective, and adverb. Her final decision was that the word refugee was a verb. The other sheet had five sentences either comparing or contrasting two things. The kid had to decide which one it was. One girl at my table named Dream finished this all with in a minute and went on to the questions at the bottom of the page, I didn’t have a chance to even read those questions because Angeline never made it there. She got upset because I wouldn’t give her the answer, she tried looking at someone else’s sheet. She told herself she was a bad reader and refused to try but when I encouraged her to try again she slowly read the sentences easily. Before even trying she just gave up. I think this says a lot about her confidence level and how she is encouraged on a daily basis. I believe that the school she regularly goes to is not giving her enough support. Angeline needed a kind of support that her school wasn’t giving her. This is why the Go Project is so important, it gives these kids another chance to be confident in their academics.
After ELA, we ate snack. Each child was given a pack of pretzels but Angeline went to her cubby that she was borrowing from a LREI 3rd grader and pulled out of her bag a chocolate chip chewy granola bar, a bottle of orange juice and her phone. I asked her if she was allowed to be on her phone and she said she needed to. I suggested she do that after school but she told me that after this weekend school, she had to go off to Chinese school. She then traded her pack of pretzels to Dream for Dream’s last piece of gum.
When we had come back from a 20min recess on the roof, the kids all sat on the rug and did math problems. They were first given an index card reading “12x__=27×4” They all very quickly stacked 27×4 and got 108 and used their knowledge of the 12 times tables realized that the answer must be 9. They then moved on the story problems which proved much more difficult. In the problem it said that 144 adults were in line to see the new Star Wars movie, that was five times as many children who were in line to see the movie. They had to figure out how many children were on line to see the movie. Almost every single kid immediately did stacking multiplication and did 144×6. They then packed up, and left.
I believe that because of their traditional schooling they can quickly do long devision, stacking multiplication but they find it more difficult to read a story problem and figure out what it’s really asking. The Go Project helps kids learn in a new way, a way that their normal school isn’t teaching them.
In morning meeting we started by going around and saying that if we were the ruler and could make one rule what would it be. One kid said “Everything that is expensive is cheap.” We don’t realize how lucky we are. We don’t realize that even at such a young age these kids know their disadvantages, but they are already ahead of us on realizing that something must change.
