Valeria Fernandez

Today was relaxed since the students are reaching the end of the semester/the beginning of summer. It was a movie day, so I helped to get the popcorn ready and portion it out/pass it to the kids. After eating the popcorn, most of the kids left the movie station to play board games or do crafts. After the movie was left quite empty, I moved over to the "play side" and drew on the whiteboard. I then moved to sitting with Hannah and a group of her other friends who were making beaded bracelets, which I am very much a fan of. I showed them how I still wore the ones I gathered during grade school when they showed me theirs - hopefully their bracelets will be just as memorable for them.

For this visit, I spent the full time with the kids who attended Kids Crop. The hosts taught us how to make bird feeders, so we were all provided pinecones and a batch of the right combination of sweets to decorate them with. We then hung the feeders up with ribbons that we tied on them. Once they were hung, the kids proceeded to do more work in the community garden. I also got to know the hosts more, and they were all super sweet. We bonded over Fayetteville's network of food resources and how we care about improving access to such resources.

At the beginning of the visit, one of the kids was unable to join for outdoor activities due to an injury, so I stayed indoors to give him company and play basketball with him. After his parents picked him up, some of the kids had come back inside, so I began to play 4-square with them in the gym. At first, the kids teamed up to help me because it'd been a long time since I played, but after a round where I was maintaining myself in the square for a bit, they ended up teaming up to beat me haha! It was super fun though, and I ended up staying longer than usual to continue playing the game. :)

This was my first day resuming after Spring Break, which means that it was also my first day back at the original YRCC facility following the remodeling/construction that had been occurring at the beginning of the semester. I joined a group of the kids for the Kids Crop program, which is a program where the children are brought to a garden to learn about planting techniques. The children were presented with seeds that they could plant and learned about conditions that would help the plants grow. Lastly, they had the chance to water the soil at the end before heading to the playground to wrap up the day. The mint was especially fruitful, and the smell was quite refreshing.

Half of the visit this day was outside while the other half was inside. At one point while we were outside, a group of about three girls had to simultaneously use the restroom, so I led them back up to the building (it's a bit of a distance) as they told me about how they were siblings. Two of them had matching rompers, and the third talked about how that was a common occurrence. During the inside portion, I played the Mario version of monopoly with Landon. To be honest, I wasn't very familiar with the game, so I don't think we played it correctly, but I think it was okay as long as we still enjoyed whatever version we made of it. :) He also kept humming the melody to Doechii's song, "Anxiety," which samples "Somebody That I Used to Know," so I ended up having the song stuck in my head (luckily, I like this song, too)!

During this visit, we resumed to going back outside as the weather began to make way for outdoor activities once again. I watched as they played tag, gave each other what they thought was "advice for sounding cool" in their peer-to-peer conversations, helped facilitate them taking turns on the monkey bars, and bonded with one of the older girls about the cool stickers on her water bottle. Towards the end, I sat with Landon and got to know him a little more as he told me a bit about his family and the dog they used to have. He asked me about what I'm going to school for, and I told him it was related to food, so he started bringing up the different conspiracies he's heard about "how food works." It's always interesting to hear what children think of these topics because I think about how it could be a reflection of the information they pick up in various spaces and the nature of children acting as sponges for their environment.

As it was a stormy day, we resumed to spending time inside and did non-demanding activities. I spent most of the time with Anita and another one of the girls who also spends a lot of time with Anita (I am still learning her name!). We mostly did color sheets, and Anita thought the colored pencil sharpener wasn't working, so I showed her how I utilized it to make it work. She broke her pencil about three times before finally getting a hang of it, and then she felt so proud that she sharpened like ten pencils to show me lol. It felt like bridging one of those "zone of proximal development" moments.

This is my log for my 3rd visit at the YRCC. Since the weather was favorable, the children were able to go outside this day for the first time this semester. For me, some of the girls decided they wanted to pretend to have a spa, so they took me with them to their "pretend shop" to braid my hair and re-decorate with the clips I have. I wear a lot of hair accessories and clips, so I'm not surprised to have become their "target customer" haha. I felt bad at one point because one of the boys wanted to braid, too, and the girls were saying that braiding is only for girls, but it did make me think about the concepts I learned in my Child Development class about the concrete ideas for gender roles that children adopt at this phase of life; it was an overall learning experience noticing that in practice. Overall, it was a pretty chill time and great weather to have been outdoors!