Cool Club

Today I went to a reading group for visually impaired children at the local primary school.

Of course this wouldn't be a proper Sarah-Beth-goes-to-a-new-place story if it didn't include me getting lost. Which I did. Since I am obviously aware of my directional problems you would think that I would have scoped out the route ahead of time. I did. I still got lost today.

But getting lost wasn't nearly as big of a problem as not being able to get into the school. I walked up to the gate at the front entrance to find it closed and locked. There was a sign saying that they didn't want people walking through the playground (which is at the front of the school) so pedestrians needed to walk around to the other entrance. I walked around to another entrance. There was another gate, but this one was open. I walked up to the school. All the doors into the school had children sitting in front of them. They all appeared to be classrooms. I was not about to just walk into a classroom. I was getting rather frantic at this point. I walked back outside the gate to regroup. I noticed a sign with the school name and phone number on it. So, I called up the school, told them who I was, why I was there, and that I couldn't figure out how to get in. Once the woman on the phone realized which entrance I was talking about she told me to walk back through the gate so she could see me on the security camera. Then so told me to walk up to one of the doors and push the buzzer, she would let me in. The children on the inside held the door for me and giggled. I apologized to the teacher and quickly left the room. The receptionist met me in the hallway and took me to where the reading group was meeting.

The group was made up of five girls who all appeared to be about 10 or 11 years old. Three of them talked about books they had read: The Mum Mystery and The Making of May by Gwyneth Rees, and Fruit and Nutcase by Jean Ure. Of those three, two of the girls gave quite good short summaries and opinions of their books. The third had written up a several page summary in her journal. If in the coming years she has a middle school teacher anything like the one I had in 6th grade she is off to a great start!

After talking about the books they had read, they all started working on letters to Jacqueline Wilson. She is their favorite author and they had asked to her come visit them, but unfortunately she has recently suffered a heart attack and isn't feeling up for a visit.

These girls have named themselves the "Cool Club." They meet about once a month to talk about the books they read and in addition to loving Jacqueline Wilson, they all love horses. They just made themselves t-shirts. They all have a slightly different design, but each one has the names of all the group members and a picture of a horse.

When I left the school I exited through the front door and discovered that I could get off the grounds through the car park. But from the car park I could not get to the road the front entrance is on, so you guessed it, I got lost again. Yet, you can see that I did find my way home.