Finally. After months of preparation and too many false starts, I’ve finally started my weekly reading group. And I can finally say, unjinxed, unqualified, that it was a wonderful experience.
I wrote pages and pages of plans for this day, spent hours gathering supplies and tracking down library books, and had more meetings than I would care to remember. Even so, I knew that I couldn’t make any real decisions until I got my feet wet. There’s a quote from German battle commander Helmuth von Moltke the Elder– “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” I think in some ways it applies here. Of course, the eight-year-old girls who participate in my program are the opposite of an enemy. Without them I couldn’t do any of this. Still, my ideas and plans were all but worthless until I found out reading levels, interests, personalities, and the group dynamic. For all I knew, they could have no actual interest in what I was doing at all. Still, I had to try.
I set up my supplies and watched as the girls and mothers filtered in. There were more than I had anticipated (that’s a good thing, I reminded myself). We did introductions. They were all polite, clever girls between six and ten–just what I had hoped for. I tried to explain what the plan for my group was, feeling more awkward by the minute. With the help of the girls’ mothers, I hesitantly suggested that we read Roald Dahl’s Matilda, and the majority hesitantly agreed. When I glanced at the time on my phone, thinking we must be nearly an hour into the two-hour session, I discovered it had been only fifteen minutes. This is going to get interesting.
I shouldn’t have worried, though. I read aloud for a while, then tried to discuss some themes of Matilda before we took a short break. After that, I hit the real jackpot of the night. It was a game that I had played many times at summer camps and writing workshops, simple in concept but universally successful. There’s probably a name for it, but I’ve never known. One person says the first sentence of a story, then the next person says a sentence, and so on until it reaches a conclusion. I wrote as quickly as possible on a wipe-off board, taking pictures as I went so as to record the story. What a story it was, full of twists and turns and magic and colorful descriptions of animals. There were a few dropped plot points (I might have to teach a bit about editing), but it was actually a very nice story. By the end everyone had opened up and was enjoying the game, including me. We were bursting with future plans and excitement. I still have so much work ahead of me–about seventy hours’ worth, actually, according to Gold Award suggested requirements–but I have no doubt that I can do it.
When the Princess Slays the Dragon 
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