First Semester in the Books!

Dear friends and family,

Last week marked the end of our first semester of HOPE afterschool and what a spectacular few months it has been! Our start was a bit rough; we had several forced breaks with conflicting school scheduling and a COVID case amongst our staff, but by the end we were hitting our stride. Towards the beginning of the semester, we were struggling to get more than four to five kids, leaving me a bit frustrated since our goal was around 13 (a full van load). Unsurprisingly, God had a plan and was simply giving us room to plan and learn what we were doing. After a few short weeks, I was approached by multiple students in the school who wanted to be a part of the program! Over the span of a month we doubled the size of our student body. Meanwhile, I was attempting to tread in a whole new territory for me. I’ve been doing Scripture or fun game related ministry for almost a third of my life but adding education to the mix was a terrifying prospect. The main thing I wanted for our program was to balance laughter and fun with the educational struggles of the kids.

We did this by having a time where we specifically worked on their one shared homework assignment, reading for thirty minutes a day. Besides the normal mix of students who either hate or love reading, we also found that many students were three or four grades behind in reading. Some are barely able to read at all. Thankfully, God had provided me with exceptional volunteers who were able to disperse throughout the group of readers. Which gave one on one attention to those that needed it and cheering
along those that simply needed the push. On top of this we wanted to change up their readings so that they weren’t monotonous. Some days we’d have them read normally, others we’d bring out piles of bean bag chairs to lounge in, and others I would read to them while they drew pictures depicting the story to flex their imaginary muscles. It was overwhelming to see the kids take off with the ownership of their books. All of them would take turns sharing with the group what was happening in their story. They’d celebrate as a group when a student finished their book. On the day of our Christmas party where we weren’t planning on having a “homework” time, they even asked if we could make time to do some reading.

Our educational activities such as science experiments, madlibs, math games, and craft projects also had a huge success rate. One of my personal highlights of the semester was the day we did our density science experiment. This involves piling different types of liquid (syrup, oil, water, etc.) into a clear jar and watching how each of them level out. Watching the kids light up when it happened and start wildly discussing how it worked was the sort of educational excitement I had hoped for.

As we wrapped up the year at our Christmas party all our fifth graders asked what would happen next year when they moved into sixth grade. I told them that our target was fifth and sixth graders so they could still come to HOPE if they wanted. All of them, ALL of them, shared a sigh of relief and started excitedly talking about coming back in January. The importance of kids on the Rez looking forward to something in the future, let alone a whole year away in the future,  can’t be overstated. I’m immensely blessed that God has worked the way He has in our fledgling semester, and can’t wait to see what He has in store next semester.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,

Trey