Midterm Reflection

Carnegie Center
When Erica, the volunteer coordinator for the Carnegie Center emailed us about the opportunity to work their Literacy and Learning night, I was ecstatic. The Center has one of these nights once  a month. The nights are themed, families in the community are invited, and the center gets ready to host a time dedicated to literacy and fun!

Volunteers assist children in playing with moonsand.

 During literacy nights at Carnegie volunteers work stations for children and parents to interact with others. The theme of this literacy night was peace and children enjoyed making crafts that reflected that. 

Here is an example that I made of the types of bracelets
that children could create.

Our volunteer coordinator, Erica, Gave us options of what stations we wanted to work at and I chose the jewelry making station. At this station kids were making jewelry and incorporating their names with the letter beads and using various shapes to make a design with the beads. It was nice to see the children helping and sharing with each other. Although some of the kids were shy I could see them slowly starting to make friends.

Volunteer pictures on the upper left helps a child
 string beads to make a necklace.

The other volunteer who I was working with was in middle school which was eye opening to me because when I was in middle school rarely would I ever volunteer to do service work. It's great that Carnegie accepts a varying age range of students to help them out.

After the children were finished making crafts, they moved on to the reading room where local Lexington poet and rap artist, "Divine" was giving a talk about respect and peace. This was one of my favorite parts of the night because it was not only for the children but for the parents. in fact this is something that the parents probably got more out of than the children. Parents, especially of lower income, may have trouble keeping the peace in their households. As you can see from the photo to the left, a lot of the parents are mothers, and they could even be single mothers, who have to raise children on their own. This talk you could tell was really engaging.

 

Finally, the night concluded with a  dinner, donated by a local restaurant. During the dinner of salad and pasta, Tasha and I helped served the participants of the Peace Literacy and Learning night. People were very grateful and often came back for seconds. I am glad to have partook in such a nice event put on for the community.