(#23) Reading to Kids (May 10, 2014) – Part 1 (Orientation and Such)

May 14, 2014

I would say this is one of the absolute easiest events I’ve been to.

Reading to Kids makes the scheduling wildly easy. Instead of emailing with a person, you just go through an automated system. You’re confirmed right away, and there’s a little page that tells you everything you need to know about the book you’ll be reading, where to go, and all that jazz.

Also, since it’s automated, if you can’t go, it’s wildly easy to cancel. So, I could see how the extreme ease could work against them a bit… but I highly doubt that the people they lose (due to people not feeling guilty about telling another human they’re no longer gonna go) outweighs the time the save by not having to manually coordinate so many people through emails and such.

So, good on them for streamlining the process and making everything as simple as it can be.

As far as the event itself, it was pretty easy and chill. They had a nice spread of bagels and pastries. As I’ve mentioned along the way, many of these volunteer events have spreads of foods that aren’t that great for you. Please don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that they want to give us anything at all, but it does make it hard sometimes when you’re working as hard as I am to do all that calorie counting and such.

But, I guess it’s nice to have to turn down food in the real world because that’s part of trying to lose weight and such. Food is around sometimes. You have to deal with it. And I dealt with it by not indulging today. So, yay me!

The tables were organized by grade level. I was with 5th grade. My understanding has come to be that if you don’t specify a grade level preference, you’re put with the older kids. It seems to be that anyone who requests, requests kids who are younger (probably since that’s more “adorable” or whatever.

But of course, we all know how weird I am about age and that we put too much emphasis on youth (even apparently when just deciding which kids we’re going to read to). So, I was happy to work with the 5th graders.

Getting back to the day, after you get in, new readers have a little orientation. Basically, they just read a book to us in the kind of fun, over-the-top manner in which we were to read books.

They also reiterated the papers about how the day would go – reading followed by craft time. And they told us small things I wouldn’t have thought about such as make sure people only go to the bathroom in pairs.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about the actual reading!

I'd love to hear from you! So whaddya say?