Miss Stacy is one of the teacher-facilitators at the A+ program. For the past two school years, I have always quickly chatted with her in the homework area, and she has always made myself and other volunteers feel welcome each week. I caught her as I was signing in, and she expressed her concern about the closing of schools due to COVID-19 and how Cornell was approaching the situation.At this time, Cornell had not canceled school, and neither had BJM. Although the current situation was uneasy, Miss Stacy definitely helped to lighten the mood that was evident from the uneasiness of the staff and students.

Since I began attending the A+ program through Rose Scholars, I have always gravitated towards the homework room. This has usually been due to a large amount of students, and not as many teachers. Today, since there were no students in the homework area, I decided to go into the game room. Here, I was able to sit and talk with some of the younger students and watch them creatively create Lego structures. What I found the most different from the students in the homework room was that the younger students were more interested in talking about their daily school life rather than the older students who would talk about their after-school activities.

After finishing homework with the regular homework students, one new student introduced himself to me and asked if I would like to play a game with him. After asking about playing catch, I suggested Uno, since the directions are relatively simple. Additionally, having only two players can be difficult since the “reverse” and “skip-a-turn” cards serve as an extra turn. This was highly debated with the other student, especially when it worked against him. It was at this point that I expressed the importance of sportsmanship. Unfortunately, the student decided to leave before we could both finish the game and before either of us could win.

Today I went to the Game Room. After playing Scramble, two students and I decided to play Frozen themed Monopoly. Although there were many missing pieces and unknown directions between the two students, we managed to construct playing pieces and a relatively correct set of directions.

What I found most interesting about this experience was the adaptation for the absence of having dice. Both students decided that me asking math problems to them was a smarter way of playing the game. So, for a kindergartner, I asked addition problems, and for the third grader, I asked basic multiplication problems. Thankfully, both kids were able to have a great time playing the game while doing math!