First Expirience with TOUCHH

On April 23, I went to Watsonville with a group of students to volunteer with the TOUCHH program. I did not know what to expect and I was pretty nervous. I felt comfortable with the group that I went with, so that was a relief. However, as we walked through the door of the front office and the coordinator began to assign us classrooms, my nerves caught up to me again. I have done a lot of volunteering with children and also worked with them as a dance instructor, but this time was different because it was far from home. I walked into the classroom to find about twenty children in the after school program from grades 4-6. The teacher was really nice and she made me feel welcome. The kids were welcoming, asked me about myself, and even told me about themselves. When they started to do their state tests, I began to understand why the school needed our help. Some of the kids were behind, some did not want to take the test, and some were struggling with the language barrier. I wanted to help them all, but there was so much to tell them about how to take the test and how to answer each question and I didn't have enough time. I remember helping on little boy in particular because I saw that he had raced through the test. He had gotten almost all of the questions wrong and I asked him why he raced through it. He said because he hated taking the time to read the sentences and then think about it because it took much more effort since the test was in English. I sat down and told him that this was important and practicing would just make things easier. When I got the chance to walk him through each question, he got about 90% of them correct. I was so happy for him and he seemed really happy as well. I love helping children because I remember what it felt like to have older kids and adults help me when I was younger. The individual attention is amazing and I look forward to going back in a couple weeks.