Casa and my cutie!

The week before Winter Break has arrived, and everyone is anxious to finish up work, take tests, and BOOK IT OUT OF HOLLAND. Only because we all really just need a break. 5 weeks of spring semester is like 10 weeks of fall semester. It’s lengthy.

To stay sane with repetitous homework, I’ve found myself in a new study spot each day. As I am usually on the North side of Campus with Dykstra and Phelps, today I thought I’d explore the “South Side.” I’m not going to lie, it’s scarier over here…but maybe just because I’m unfamiliar with it. Did you know that the Western Seminary shares space with Hope? I’m in the Beardslee Sem Library right now. It’s definitely a different side of Hope that I haven’t seen.

CASA!, an after school mentoring program here at Hope. I volunteer to mentor Angelina, or Nina, for two hours twice a week. We always have a BLAST and she is really smart. She’s in fourth grade and she’s such a doll. Last week we made Valentine’s day cards for CASA supporters. Every day she tells me that CASA is the best part of her week. HOW CUTE. As she slowly acclimates to me, she feels a lot more comfortable and has starting to say hilarious things all the time like today when she jokingly told me I was “bad news” after I had distracted her from playing MathBlaster division. hah!

Isn’t she adorable!!

On Tuesday, I proposed that we take a picture of one of our activities during each session so that at the end of CASA we can make a scrapbook of our experiences and have a photo-record of our time together.

Nina thought it was a great idea, and thought our first photo should be together! So she took this one of us:

 

Today was a special day, as a local bank hosted a Valentine’s Day party for the kids! The fourth graders had cupcakes and played bingo with sweethearts!

 

New High Score in Math Blaster!

 

It’s really special to share my time with Nina because she really does brighten up my day. CASA is an excellent study break and is something I look forward to every week. Each of our sessions is broken up into three parts: Homework with snacks, reading time, and “enrichment” which is usually an educational type of play time. Nina particularly enjoys doing math and spelling hard words and during most of her enrichment period she asks for really hard words to spell on the whiteboard. It’s pretty eyeopening to realize what some of the kids don’t get to do each day, whether it’s at school or home. Nina only gets to go on a computer during a 20 minute typing period at school, so she loves to play on the CASA computers, whether we play Mathblaster or write stories in Microsoft Word. She also doesn’t have any type of coloring things at home, so I got her a box of crayons! I can’t imagine not having coloring utensils at home growing up!

Today we also played with the whiteboard and played hangman. I had to solve this one: