For my blog, I have been keeping a journal of my experiences each week rather than posting after every service learning visit. This blog will have all my experiences thus far for my service learning.
October 4 - My first day of service was just meeting the principle. The purpose of my service will be tutoring students who have difficulties in sight words. I did not meet the students this week, but I think that this will be a great learning experience for me, both in helping students who have difficulties and also in general teaching.
October 11 - There was a mix up with the students schedules and it caused some confusion as to what I should do. It took a while to find the students and get them out of their class to work with them. I only got to work with three of the five students today. They seemed willing to learn and were cooperative. I am going home this weekend for fall break and I am going to talk to some of my teachers from grade school to get help with ideas to make the tutoring fun for the students.
October 18 - The school changed what I am doing when I get there for my service. I am only working with one student who has difficulty with sight words. His name is Jayden. He is smart and energetic and willing to work. Some of the things I am doing with him are going through the flash cards and having him write the words to help him learn them. We also play tic tac toe where I lay all the cards down like a tic tac toe board and he flips the cards over. If he gets it right then he gets and X, if not he gets an O. He seems to enjoy it. I read a story with a group of first graders who are ahead of their class. They all want turns to read.
October 25 - I worked with Jayden again. He is really energetic again. He seems to enjoy learning. There's a tutor on Wednesdays who tests him on the words and he if pronounces the word correctly then he gets to move onto the next set of words. He got almost all new cards this week. That made me feel good because it made me feel like he was really starting to understand the sight words and that I'm doing a good job with him. When I worked with the first graders we were given a new story and some worksheets to work on. I was told to only do one worksheet a week. We read the story and the first worksheet which was just a poem. The students all took turns reading it. It was good to see how they enjoyed getting involved.
November 1 - I worked with Jayden again and he had new words again this week. I am glad he is progressing so well with his words. He told me that the Wednesday tutor copies how I work with him. This made me feel good because it meant that Jayden enjoyed the way I work with him and that my games helped him learn. For the first graders, we reread the story that we did last week. They are starting to listen better to me, I think it just took some time for them to get used to me. We then worked on the next worksheet related to the reading. The enjoyed working on the worksheet because they all got to contribute something to completing the worksheet. This was my best day of service so far.
