I've been working at an elementary school in Seattle with the Children's Literacy Project (CLP), which sends tutors to schools to work with kids. I'm a tutor, and I'll be posting excerpts from my CLP journal.Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Back to working with word sort. Today there were about three different kids at once all working on different word sorts. Actually Nick continued to tell me he was sorting words, when all the while he was plainly cutting up paper squares into smaller squares. He eventually got around to sorting, but then kept sticking his nose into Chrystal’s word sort, which Chrystal was none too happy about. She would say a word before explaining it to me, and Nick would start telling me what it meant before she could get a word in edgewise.
Two of the words that stuck out today were “bandit” and “pirate”. Chrystal didn’t know what either word meant, so I told her a bandit was a robber, and a pirate was a robber who did his robbing at sea. I said bandits would hold up carriages and banks in the Wild West, and pirates would do the same thing with ships on the ocean. Nick butted in that Blackbeard was a pirate and started to tell a story about him, but Chrystal looked so furious I told him not to. After I’d explained what a pirate was, Chrystal did not look happy. “I’m scared,” She said quietly, and that made me feel pretty bad. I hadn’t said anything scary or terrible about pirates, except that they were robbers, but maybe that was enough. I grew up reading stories of a romanticized Wild West and hero bandits who would hold up rich carriages, and stories of Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest, but I then didn't grow up in the city where muggings were a daily occurrence. Needless to say, we moved on.
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