Going into the streets

8 10 2012

Over 700 Morningside students packed Eppley Auditorium as the annual “Into the Streets” took place Wednesday, October 3rd.  51 groups helped as they went out into the Siouxland community to volunteer for the morning.

This was my second year volunteering with into the streets and I loved the opportunity to give back to the community I live in. Last year I went with my passport class to Dakota Dunes to remove sandbags from the flooding during the summer of 2011. This year I went with 13 other members of the CHA CHA (wellness group) and campus ministry groups to the third through fifth grade elementary school in Sergeant Bluff.

Each member of our group was sent to a separate classroom where we worked with the teacher and the kids in that class one on one.

One of the members from the CHA CHA group, sophomore Drew Nolan said, “It was great to take a break from schoolwork to give our service to people who really appreciated it.   All the teachers at Sergeant Bluff School seemed very grateful.  It was also fun to be able to go back a few years and play with kids for the morning in P.E.”

I worked with a fourth grade classroom where the teacher had me do busy work for her. I laminated sheets of paper and cut them out. I also sorted box tops for education and put them on sheets of paper. I never really had much interaction with the students but the teacher seemed to really appreciate my help.

I was grateful for the opportunity to help someone who needed it and seemed to appreciate it.  After we got done, it was fun to be able to discuss with the rest of our group what they all experienced.  Even though our group all went to the same place each of us had a different story to tell.  Some listened to the students read, some graded papers for the teachers, and others did busy work for the teachers.  Overall each of us had a great experience working at the Sergeant Bluff elementary school.

 


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2 responses to “Going into the streets”

9 10 2012
  Hannah Hecht (16:00:32) :

-I like how the lede describes what is going to come up in the story. I think you ought to add something about how you’re going to talk mainly about your experience, and not about Into the Streets as a whole, though. Or you could include the experiences of people who went to places other than Sergeant Bluff Elementary.
-I don’t really like the phrase “busy work” because it implies that the work you did wasn’t helpful and you just did it to occupy time. It’s also contradicted when you say that the teachers were grateful.
-Usually, I wouldn’t like the use of first-person in the story, but I think it works very well, since you use it consistently. If you just randomly added “I” in every now and then, it wouldn’t work. However, it reads kind of like a reporter going out in the field and describing her experiences.

10 10 2012
  fuglsang (19:48:05) :

Yes, busy work has connotations. But that’s OK in this context.