“Never do anyth…

“Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.”
-Roald Dahl

First Meeting!

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.