Differences in My Job

Because I still haven't started at the Helen and Douglas House, I have basically two jobs. On Monday and Wednesday afternoons, I work at the East Oxford Community Centre at a Homework Club for Somalian children. Usually three days a week (recently Tuesday, Thursday and Friday) I'm working at the Museum of Oxford. Those two jobs are so incredibly different and I have such different responsibilities and experiences ta the two jobs.

Homework Club
-lots of the kids have reading and writing issues, so I spend a lot of time sounding out words in easy reading books (or Spiderman comics) and encouraging them to sound out words as they write
-with a couple of the girls I've worked with, I walk through a math problem with them and then let them do the math problem, helping them out only when they make a mistake, letting them do as much as they can on their own
-play games, mostly educational games so playing a lot of scrabble to help them come up with words (and some are good!), a math BINGO game, and at one point, an easy version of Scattagories. On Wednesday the older kids come for help but there were some younger kids who had nothing to do so we picked five categories- name, country, food, toy, hobby- and they took turn picking letters and we had to come up with a word for each starting with the chosen letter. I was surprised that they didn't pick the letter that their name started with for an easy answer- I certainly would have done that!
-sometimes I just chat with them! This past week, I ended up sitting with two younger boys- Abdi and Omar- and we showed each other how to write in cursive (I got a check or an x for whether or not my American cursive fit the British cursive) and we wrote different words in our own handwriting. It kept them spelling and kept them from wreaking havoc and as we lightly teased each other, we laughed a lot!

Museum of Oxford
-usually I just patrol the galleries, answering questions about the artifacts, pointing people upstairs to see Giles, our skeleton, but sometimes I'm given new and exciting tasks!
-last week, Darren and I went to the Damp Room (because the floor is stained by past damp), dragged out three mannequins and their stands and dressed them up in a WWII nurses' uniform, a WWII Women's Army uniform and a Civil War outfit. I named them Nellie, Stella and Jemima, respectively and it was a good thing nobody overheard us dressing these ladies because our conversation would have sounded so inappropriate (take off her skirt and do it again... yeah, pull that shirt a little tighter and button it... it isn't sliding down onto the pole!, etc).
-also last week, I sat over at the Town Hall with Katie and talked up the museum and played "Guess the Artifact" with some pieces of our handling collection as we manned our booth for the Oxfordshire Faire
-when I close the museum, I get to go around with a big set of keys, turn off lights, lock doors, reset counters, etc. It's very exciting.
-Just this week, I was trained on the till and sat at the front of the house for a few hours, welcoming guests to the museum, selling items and giving people directions (and trying to get as many donations as possible!)
-this isn't a responsibility per-se but the younger crew and I enjoy finding each other in the galleries (especially when it's quiet/dead) and chat to get to know each other better. Today Katie, Tom and I chatted for over and hour and Katie and I did the same the day before. Let's just say that the nicer the weather gets here, the quieter the galleries are so we have to dispell the boredom in anyway that we can.

I'm so lucky that I've got the opportunity to work these two very different but really great and fun and at times challenging jobs.