I was 10 minutes late for MOP. Edy and Eva had gone ahead of me to set up our MOP site on the St. Inez nullah.
I arrived and looked around knowing that MOP must be indoors as it was wet outdoors. In the past, a parent offered her front room for MOP sessions but peering outside most doors left me feeling vacant. There were no piles of slippers and sandals and I wondered where MOP had got to.
Then a young child indicated that I should head to the temple. An adult felt I should go there too and I did. Peering from the little temple was Eva. ‘ Oh’ I said in story book fashion, ” there you are ” and I was greeted by a resounding chorus of voices ‘ Didi! Good Evening’ . I was welcomed into the small front room of the temple that the community have said we can use in the rains for library . And so with temple bells above us, the rain outside of us and the temple goddess inside of us, we settled down for a MOP session.
We read From Head to Toe, an Eric Carle book that delights. The animal actions were greeted with great reading fervour and the rhythm of the session caught on quickly. The children began to read I am ______ and I can ______ and soon we had read and re read the whole book, we acted out all the actions, saying I can do it ! and had warmed ourselves up into a wonderful reading frenzy of Carle happiness!
We proceeded to create additional pages for the book building on the same sequence of the story and it was so remarkable to see that the children are eager to write. They do not have any inhibitions about asking for spellings ( like scratches for the monkey) and words like butterfly. Many children re read their own little patches of Head to Toe elements and moved to the box to choose their books to take home.
St. Inez MOP is nascent, but strong. The little group is very cohesive, delight in their ID cards and BW bags and feel proud to be library members. We do too!