Tuesday morning was our morning off, so we got to go on our sightseeing adventures. The best part of our morning probably came with our lunchtime meal at a little vintage coffee shop and café. We had a really great time talking and getting to know each other better, and it served as an awesome bonding session for our group.
We arrived at 826 and started helping with Promic-con preparation activities. Every year, 826 throws a “prom” for the employees and volunteers to raise money for 826 and celebrate their work. Megan and I had the task of going through dozens of 826CHI’s published “chat-books” to find funny comic-con related quotes from kids to paste on giant quote bubbles at the prom. This gave me another opportunity to read the kids’ work, but this time I got to read very light-hearted, hilarious stories by younger kids.
During after school tutoring, 826 has three “Writing Tables” where every kid has to go at some time during their tutoring session to respond to a prompt and write a creative short story. I got to staff one of the Writing Tables on Tuesday with Natalie, which I really enjoyed. Unlike working through math problems painstakingly slowly, I got to act silly and throw out crazy ideas to inspire the kids’ writing. Watching each one of the kids and their individual creative processes was very interesting, because they each came up with something very unique, and it was easy to see how much fun the kids were having with it. 826 is doing an amazing job encouraging kids to work on their writing skills in a very fun way that they can enjoy, and it was really cool to know I was contributing to that cause.
After the kids left, we helped Kendra set up for a volunteer training session (which we also attended to learn more about how we can help during our time at 826.) One thing that really stuck out to me was that there were several volunteers that had indicated their interested up to a year ago, and had been waiting until now to get involved. I think it speaks really highly of 826 as an organization and the potential of goodness in people in general that they were willing to wait so long to help at 826.
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