A couple of weeks ago we went to volunteer with the Go Project. It was on a saturday at our school, starting at 9:30. When we arrived at the school we were taken to another room with what seemed like a volunteer group from another school. They gave us a quick briefing on the day and what we’d be doing. Then we were matched with a grade, Anna and I were given the fourth grade. We met our class in the auditorium for a morning meeting. We had two other volunteers, a head teacher and a teaching assistant. In the morning meeting they handed out awards for perfect attendance, student of the month and teacher of the month. The student of the month seemed not to be there that week. They then chose a representative from each homeroom to come up and receive a riddle for their class to solve. They had a few minutes to solve two riddles. They went around after a couple of minutes and everyone shared their answers, those who were correct were promised a prize. Our class, 4b, was then sent to the third grade classroom on the top floor. One student read off todays schedule, the teacher then realized it was wrong and moved some times around, making reading a slightly smaller time frame. We went around in a circle and answered the question, if you could make a rule what would it be? One boy said that his rule would be that everything would be affordable. We moved onto reading, where the teacher read a paragraph about a family of refugees coming to America. She asked the kids to figure out if a sentence was important information, or unnecessary detail. Afterwards we moved to tables, each volunteer was assigned a table, where the kids would take a short test. They had five sentences, and they had to figure out whether the sentence was comparing or contrasting, for extra credit they could also say whether a refugee was a noun, verb, adjective or adverb. I helped to explain to my table what comparing and contrasting meant, and what an adverb was. One girl in particular, seemed fed up with staying on a saturday to learn. She drew Five Nights at Freddy’s characters on her worksheet and when I told her we only had a couple of minutes left to finish she quickly glanced around at her classmates papers before writing her own answers. They dropped their index cards into a large empty wine case to be pulled for a raffle later. During the entire day a few kids had problems following directions and seemed frustrated with doing work, they were sat at a table in the middle with a volunteer to talk to them for the entire school day.

After ELA they had a quick snack. Pretzels were provided but one of the girls at my table instead went to her cubby to get a cup of jelly. During snack the kids had some free time to talk, but most of the kids at my table decided to draw. Two girls, who knew each other from a previous school, talked about how one of them had taught the other everything she knew about art because her school didn’t have an art curriculum. The same girl told me that her school was teaching a grade above. So when she started in first grade, they were already teaching her second grade classes. We went up to the roof for a twenty minute recess. All the kids seemed disappointed at first because they couldn’t play on the jungle gym, but later when it was time to leave they hid in a large wooden box in an effort to stay. When we came back the room it was time for math. We first started with a simple problem. The same girl who was having trouble in ELA, was now having extra trouble in math. The two other girls at my table finished in no time and moved onto the rug. That left the one girl who was frustrated while trying to understand how to figure out how many times 5 went into 25. I tried to ask her questions that might prompt an answer, but all she seemed to be doing was multiplying random number in an effort to guess it. Eventually time was up and she scribbled down a random number and dropped in the same case from earlier. We sat on the rug once more and they solved one last word problem before they lined up with their coats and backpacks. The teacher pulled a random card out of the case to award a prize to the first card she pulled out that had the right answer. She pulled out a card that belonged to one of the girls at my table, apparently she had won for the past two weeks, so they pulled out another card and gave that student the prize.

My day at the Go Project really showed me that this extra time spent out of the classroom really can affect the child’s comprehension of a subject. To the students they may seem like frustrating, annoying exercises, but if they stick with them, it could have a really good effect on their academic success.