When self-quarantine started in the country one question arose for me, can I actually work from home? How would I be able to do my work activities? For a moment I thought it was going to be a hard task, concentrating while being at home. And what was I going to do once I had finished what I had been assigned? With the passing of time as I finished the activities I had, I was assigned more responsibilities. One of them was sorting books by reading level from preschool to university. I was so excited because reading is one of the activities I love most! Can you imagine how adding it affected my daily work?
Having a notion of what grade level each amusing book belonged to, just by its title could have been a project culminated at the speed of light. But we needed to do the work well, we focused on classifying the books thinking of our readers. And how nice can reading be for a person who does not enjoy reading? Foreseeing this, we decided to organize the books by reading levels. This way the students can easily find a book of their interest and the excitement of reading is lived by everyone. The purpose of giving students the already sorted books versus unsorted is to guide their learning, to help them be more creative. That way they are able to write amazing papers and imagine building a better world than what we have now, all through what can be discovered in books. Additionally, to accomplish this project we are collaborating with our communities and receiving the help of a few teachers that are willing to give some of their time to this project.
The process of classifying the books has allowed us to begin our second big reading activity. Earlier on as we worked on finding and sorting books, the idea of a reading program with all the municipios of La frontera seemed to be the best use we could give to our resource. Yet, we did not count with the pandemic lasting this long. We needed to think of something different to do with this resource and thanks to a suggestion we decided to implement a smaller program. We involved a total of 60 students, the seventh graders who graduated from our bilingual school last year and some of the Shoulder to Shoulder scholarship students because they had already been given a tablet containing books. Now they just needed to dive into the reading world with the tablet they had been provided. To begin though, they were assigned a book called ‘’Little women’’ by May Louis Alcot to discuss as a group, they’ve said it is an excellent book. It is encouraging to see how some of the students have taken this activity as an important tool in their learning and besides reading the assigned book, they are also reading a book just for fun. Every other Sunday I host a ZOOM meeting with one group of students and it is great to see them adding their opinions about the book!
So yes, I found out it is possible to work from home. Especially doing things you love, which is my case these days. My job matches my reading hobby making it even more exciting to do work from home. And I can’t help but be thankful for the collaboration of Damaris Quintero, the scholarship program coordinator. She is supporting the execution of this project by overseeing the reading of her scholarship students. As well as the support of Miss Jessy Molina in joining our reading group.
