Rising Star Outreach- Sharing My Story With You: 6.23 :)

I was able to tutor again today! Our focus was their reading today which was fun! For the older kids, we worked on reading short stories such as Hansel and Grettle, the Elves and the Shoemaker, Repunzell, and a couple of others. Some of them just love to read while for others, it is a real struggle and you really have to work with them to sound out each word. I had tutored mostly girls on Monday, so it was really funny to see the difference between them and the boys. The boy that I tutored today, Satish, had two ways of reading to me… yelling or whispering… literally… hahaha  It is just always very rewarding to help them with their reading or homework problem sets and see them light up when they finally remember how to say a word or get a complement from a volunteer about how they did something. Villichamar, another boy that I worked with, wanted two huge high fives after each problem that he did!

Another neat thing that happened today was that I was able to paint with the Indian lady, Mira, who cooks and cleans for the volunteers. She doesn’t know any English so it is hard because sometimes you will tell her thank you for something but are not sure if she understood what you said. I was getting all of my paints ready in the kitchen before I did my art class and had gotten a lot on my hand. Just for fun, I used some of it to paint a flower one of the papers in the kitchen. Mira walked in and saw what I was doing and came over smiling really big (this was the FIRst time I had seen her smile!!). She then opened some of my paints and started painting with me! We just painted for a while and laughed at what the other person was painting or trying to say. She would try to tell me something in Tamil and I would in English and then we would just laugh together. Even if you do not speak the same language, you can find other ways to communicate and make them happy! Neat, huh?!

*"auntie auntie, I want purple!!"

*The crazy crazy photo that we got to take! haha... this is only a third of the kids- it took ten min just to get them to take this one!! haha

The art classes were definitely a highlight of my day. For Hollie and Monica who helped me find a way to make room to pack all of the painting supplies at three in the morning right before I left, thank you thank you thank you!! I loved painting with the kids and I ended up having about twenty kids come to paint with my friend Ali and me. They were so excited about painting! We used a bunch of plastic garbage bags for paint shirts which was funny because some of the tinier girls were swimming in them! Getting the picture with some of the students that came to our classes was probably one of the most chaotic things that I have ever done, haha. Their housemother was yelling to them in Tamil to listen to me while trying to talk to me in English and they were all running around with hands COVERed in nonwashable tempra paint (they had run out of the washable paint at the store!!) and taking their paint shirts off before they had washed off their paint covered hands!! Ah! We absolutely loved it though and we got a painting of just their handprints which will be fun to have.