Learn and Serve on November 18, 2009

Today in learn and serve I was able to work with a Chinese American student whom I have been able to work with each week. This week we were working on her pronouncing words and by sounding out the word figuring out which letter it began with.

It was quite interesting to see that the mistakes she was making with her letter sounds are the same mistakes all kids make while learning them. She was making mistakes when it came to the G and J, also C and K. You could see the look at her face was so confident. She knew that she knew the letters and words and was excited to show me how much she had progressed.

After we played a game and she did amazing she just looked over at me, gave me a thumbs up, and just smiled. It was so nice to see her happy and proud of herself. Before, at the beginning of my placement, she was scared to talk in front of me because she seemed embarassed. It was hard to ever see her happy, or proud of herself. It felt so good to see that she was proud of herself!

Blog November 5th

 Today in class we worked with students from opportunities unlimited. In a small group we were able to take the student around campus and work on our video/ picture project. Myself and Kristin worked with Lisa. She was so much fun and energetic. When we got back to the classroom we worked together in different stations. The different stations were story telling, play doh, building a fort, and intelligence. We were not able to do all the stations but we did the play doh and the fort. Lisa really enjoyed both. When we played with the play doh she loved talking to us about herself and learning about us. She also seemed to enjoy building the fort because she liked our team work and loved working with everyone.

My experience with Lisa was amazing. I was extremely nervous about meeting my student and was not sure what to expect. I noticed that although Lisa had a disability she was no different than anyone else. She acted and talked almost as if she had no disability. After meeting Lisa and spending time with her my nerves lifted and I became so comfortable. I felt almost as if I was just spending time with a friend!

Chapter 11 talks about students who have trouble seeing. On page 367 in our text there is a statistic that I found interesting. "Measures of social maturity and cognitive development showed delay." I was not able to spend time today with a student who vision is impaired but I could see how it would be difficult for a student who has these obstacles. The activity where we were able to go all over campus and make a film or take pictures in order to make a slide show would be very difficult for that student. Because they would not be able to take the picture or film part of their film it would frustrate them.

Learn and Serve on November 4, 2009

Today in learn and serve I was able to work with a kindergarten student who is an ESL student but has progressed so much in the past few months. I was helping her write a short paragraph about her weekend. Before writing out what she wanted to say I had her say it to me, while telling me what she did she spoke proper english. Unfortunately when she went to write down what she said it was completely different. When she was writing she did not use the past tense and was very confused when myself and the teacher explained it to her.

Another student I worked with is one I work with every week. I have blogged about her before, she is Asian American and was having lots of trouble with her english. I was quite surprised and happy to see the progress she has made in just a week. She is now speaking in full sentences, and is having conversations with me and the teacher. We were able to get her to talk to us about her halloween costume. She loved talking about it, you could tell she loved her costume and had so much fun by her expressions.