WASHINGTON READING CORPS

                                                                  http://www.wellscribedwords.blogspot.com/   http://www.rindarealm.com/

I have a new job, starting in September, as a reading tutor with Washington Reading Corps!

The job will last for ten-and-a-half months; I will be working 40 hours and five days a week.  I will be paid, not a lot, but I will be paid, and I will receive free training, paid health insurance, and some paid vacation and sick leave.  At the end of the program, I will also be given money for further college education. 

I’ll be working in a school not far from my home.  I will tutor children from Pre-K through third grade, in small groups and individually; I will, as well,  help to train volunteer reading tutors.  I won’t be transcribing medical reports for healthcare providers.  Yay!  Yes, in ten-and-a-half months, I will never, never, never have to hear a medical word if I don’t want to hear one!  I most certainly will not be typing any.  I am so happy about this!

I have lots of experience with children of different ages in the classroom:  When still in high school, I was hired as an aide in a newly-formed Head Start program one summer; the Head Start supervisor decided that I was wasted as kitchen help; I also did a lot of babysitting for my high school teachers at fifty cents an hour. 

When I got out of college, after helping in schools for some of my classes there, I taught preschool for two years, full-time. 

Then, I babysat on and off here and there for different people until I got out of business school when I taught in church children’s programs for several years in between doing school visits for my first book.  

Finally, I moved here to Bremerton, and children in the streets, neighbor children, discovered me, and I then did a fair amount of putting on Band-Aids, giving drinks and snacks and words of wisdom and dealing with the powers that be who should have been caring for those children properly but were not.  Along the way, I’ve learned how to do many arts and crafts activities with children. 

I want, after this Washington Reading Corps program is over, to go on to graduate school and take a Master’s in reading and literacy and thus pull together my B.A. in sociology and my fifth year of undergraduate credits in early childhood education together with my life experiences and business training.  I might consider a Master’s in special education; I’m sure it will be one or the other.

The one thing of which I am absolutely CERTAIN is that I do not want a Masters’s in writing for children and young adults!!! 

I feel a cold, creeping sensation down my backbone even thinking about getting a Master’s in English or a Master’s in writing!  I was told by an editor in children’s books that “it would ruin you.”  And she wasn’t laughing when she said it.  And she didn’t mean that I should quit my writing.

So, being a reading tutor and then pursuing a Master’s in reading and literacy does not mean that I will quit my writing. 

I am CERTAIN that I will continue to write for children and middlegraders–as I have done in the past.  I will also continue blogging and wiki building and web site building and songwriting and poetrymaking. 

I can’t seem to stop doing those things; they make me happy; it’s just that now I am free to spend more time on something else that has made me happy for most of my adult life:

Teaching children how to read stories.  Telling them stories.  Reading them stories.  Listening to stories with them.  And learning from them.

I couldn’t be happier than I am right now about these changes in my life. I couldn’t be happier!

http://www.wa.gov/esd/wsc/program/readingcorp.htm 

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