Volunteering on MLK day

Monday January 19, 2009

Martin Luther King Jr Day. Since we are homeschooling and since Hypersteve is a freelancer, days off don’t really mean much. In fact I had thought to ignore the holiday and go on with school as usual, even though all the public schools are closed, of course I would spend a little extra time on social studies with a nice discussion about Martin Luther King Jr. We started the day with some basic letter writing practice and some word recognition. As we worked I had NPR on in the background. They were talking almost entirely about Obama’s call that this should be a national day of service (Congress declared MLK day a day of service 7 years ago, but with. I used to do a lot of volunteer work back when I was a kid and would like to help Rocket Boy get into the same habit. Without the time limitations of regular school, we can schedule it in pretty easily. Anyway, it was still early in the day so I decided to do a quick search for volunteer opportunities that might be appropriate for a 6 year old. That’s a pretty tall order. It has to be meaningful for him but it also has to be significant to the organization. I used to lead a lot of volunteer groups and know that unskilled volunteers are almost as much of a liability as a help.

We found Children for Children, a group connects kid volunteers with agencies. They were having a service extravaganza of a NYC high school. It sounded perfect. I declared a quasi-school day.

We got to the high school and there were hundreds of kids and about a dozen service projects – everything from writing birthday cards for seniors at a nursing home, to decorating and packing bags of books to go to underserved schools. Some of the projects were kind of inane, but we found a group making blankets for a shelter – those silly no-sew fleece blankets which are basically two pieces of fleece, with the edges cut into small strips and the strips knotted together – it was right up our alley. They had a group crocheting too, and Rocket Boy really wanted to do that, but they didn’t have enough hooks.

It was great, we worked for a few hours, we talked about what volunteering is and why it is important, and we talked about civil rights and MLK.

Not reading, writing, and arithmetic, but a really productive fulfilling day.