I miss the little kiddies…

The Monday after we came back from camping, Wisdom’s Summer Culture Camp that was held in San Jose began. I volunteered to be a TA again (my third year!) and ended up in Class Dumpling, which consists of 3rd/4th graders. I was supposed to be an Office TA, but then the people there called me and asked me if I wanted to switch, and since I like hanging out with little kids so much, I agreed.

They turned out to be little hellions. (I know I’ve repeated this phrase a gazillion times)

They were more like that most of the time than little angels (one of the boys wasn’t even that tiny seeing how he was almost my height and was only going into 4th grade O_o). Those were crazy tiring five days. We TAs had to arrive at camp by 7:30 am the first day, and from then onwards at 8 am for the rest of the week. We stayed there until 6:30 pm every day, since we have an hour of TA meeting after every day. That means we spend, like, 8-9 hours with a class of elementary kids every single day.

We are in charge of taking them to the bathroom, watching over/playing with them during break, making sure they pay attention during class, dancing/singing/asking them to participate during activities time, telling them to line up whenever we go anywhere, and just basically being mothers. Of 31 children.

I don’t know what to say to this, but we have 31 kids in Class Dumpling (and I think there would have been more except some got moved up to the older class because then there would be too much in ours). Our camp is the smallest camp, being there is only a total of 90 kids put into 4 classes, and our class is 1/3 of that number. =_____=

Every class had 4 TAs except ours, which had 5, but there might as well have been 3. Crystal has been a TA there for 3 years also, and she really knows how to take care of the kids, so she was a BIG help. It was Joyce’s first time, but she caught on really fast. Not that I’m bragging, but I think it was mostly Crystal and I controlling the whole class. The kids only knew our names for a while. The two guys were kind of “whatever” and didn’t do much; they even slept during class! It was kind of like that for the first 3 days, then they slowly caught on and was better Friday, but that was already the last day.

I nearly cried during the last day when we were singing and had our hands on each other’s shoulders. The TAs were supposed to sit in a line facing their class, but I ended up sitting with the kids because I’ll miss them so, so much. They were much adorable when they sang, danced, talked to me about their interests, pulled my arm, hugged my waist, poked fun at me, and listened to what I had to say. <3

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