Longhouse School

9:00am, Lolita. Taking a break while our contractor Max fills up the pool.

It seems like a new routine. We do Track followed by the Perimeter Walk. The Walk acts as a cooling down activity but there is so much to see. We will have the pool starting tomorrow to wash us down. No more stinky children (and Teacher Lolita!).

Today the moon was out! It’s a bright chilly day—but nothing is too tough for Longhouse students.

When we got back, the students were so excited when Max began filling the pool. “Talk to your neighbors. How many cubic feet of water do you think the pool will hold? How long do you think it will take to fill it?

At this point Lori slipped me some sheets of paper with her writing. “Read it!” she told me.

So I did. I couldn’t put it down. I excused myself to type it up. What follows is Lori’s report with a few edits by yours truly.

From Lori, typed by Lolita:

Teacher Lolita is also our next-door neighbor. She and her wife Heidi own the exact same RV as ours. The three of us are all only children. All the time I have to switch my names for her. “Teacher Lolita” when in school and “Lolita” when she’s my Big Sister. She says I’m her Little Sib and we also quarrel a lot. But it’s fun when we make up.

Benita and Percy, my parents, both work two jobs. We are saving up for a summer family vacation to Disney World. We’ve never had a big vacation together and I can’t wait! They have the keys to Lolita’s RV and drop me off there before they run off to work. I just crawl under her covers and go back to sleep.

She wakes me when it is time to go to Track. She’s been up for a while. I know because I hear her doing her soft morning chanting. And I hear her fingers tapping on the laptop. She does a lot of both! I know the story of Helen Keller. I feel like Lolita is my Anne Sullivan.

I love Longhouse Elem, my new school. Somehow it just fits me. My old school was nice, but it just wasn’t for me. I kept on getting in trouble. I’ve hardly ever gotten in trouble here.

Right now, we are doing a lot of Community Studies about the Indigenous people who lived here centuries before the European conquerors. For lunch, we are eating food a lot like what the Indigenous people used to prepare. We study a lot about the plants that were around then and–and still are now if you look for them. We sometimes have sleepovers and look at the moon and stars. We tell and make up lots of stories. We just finished reading “The Girl Who Drank the Moon.” We work very hard writing and illustrating what we have learned. I love our math projects and all of our sports. Tomorrow the pool opens up again!

But what do I love the most? It is Community Service. More than anything! We take turns “interning” with Ms. Dee in the kitchen to prepare lunch and snacks. We take responsibility for cleaning our spaces—even the bathrooms. Why not? And starting this Saturday, kids are invited to help The Deep Clean which used to be a parents-only activity.

But most of all I love helping other kids. We take turns helping out in the Daycare. I love playing with the very little ones. I love feeding and rocking them. And, yes, I know how to change diapers.

But most of all I love helping out the first graders and some of my second-grade friends. I’m not sure how I learned to read. It just came naturally to me, I guess. But I guess not everyone learns the same way. I love sitting with kids who are starting out. They all know their letters but I like practicing with them how letters sound. They are getting very good at combining letters and making sounds. I like practicing with them something called “Dolch words.” They are words you just have to memorize because you can’t sound them out too much. “Through,” “though,” and “thought.” Go figure how “ough” sounds! It’s better to just memorize them. And we trade our “free word cards.” Teacher Bernie gives me some easy books to read with them like “Cat in the Hat.” I like to make them laugh when we read them together.

Teacher Lolita has been teaching us these cute and funny songs from a movie called South Pacific. “Happy Talk,” “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” “Dites-Moi,” and “There Is Nothing Like a Dame.” But she’s also teaching us this most beautiful song, “Some Enchanted Evening.” It’s stuck in my head and I can’t get rid of it. It won’t go away, like Luna’s magic in the book. Go away!!!! PLEASE!

I told my parents that we can never move. I want to graduate from Longhouse High School!