Spring 2017, 1st place prize winner

Blog Post 1

My experience at the Family Learning Center is going pretty well. Before I worked with University Hill Elementary School students for a day and I really enjoyed it. Therefore, this time I wanted to experience it again because those small children are so innocent and fun to work with. At first, I was very cautious about communicating with elementary school students because we are from different cultures therefore, I tried not to offend or do something wrong that will make them feel bad. However, as I come there often, I am more relaxed and feel comfortable to work with them.

I have been working with a Mexican girl called Janessa. She is very sweet and smart girl in her age. Also, she is very hardworking and even though she has a plenty of homework to do, she does not put them off for the next day or so, instead she tries to finish them as soon as possible. To be honest her English is better than mine (laughed), (I am a non-native speaker). We tried to do her homework with different methods such as using fingers, taking turns to read, using dice and taking examples of different objects to count.

What I understood is that Janessa is on her critical period of acquiring a language. Therefore, acquiring English as her second language is faster and easier for her than other students who are acquiring English after puberty. Even though she is a first-grader, when we read a book in English, she did not take a long time to read or spell it. Everything was smoothly and amazingly, she had no accent when reading or speaking. I observed this because she had a Spanish homework to read, which I did not know. However, when I told her that I could not be able to help her to do the Spanish homework, she said that she could help me to learn, which made me feel so good. (By the way, now I can read Spanish a little bit). I think being bilingual is a good thing and I do not think that she will lose Spanish as she learns English because she speaks Spanish at home (her parents do not speak English) and at the same time she spends almost half of the day speaking in English in class and at FLC.

I liked one strategy at Family Learning Center, which is teachers or students who are working there do not force them to do their homework. So that students can freely think and develop their minds. Also, their time is divided into couple of different activities such as free time in the beginning, when they can use computers, draw or paint, play with lego and many other activities besides doing their homework. The second half is used for studying, if they do not have homework, they are recommended to read books. Lastly, before going home, they like to play outside, which is very fun.

I enjoy every single time working with those kids and looking forward to visit them next week.

Blog post 2

I have been working at the Family Learning Center with a variety of kids from different backgrounds, families, and ages. I consider this volunteering as a vital part of my experience in the U.S. that I have been working with kids. First of all, I won't lie that everything was easy for me. I realized that I lack skills to communicate with little kids because sometimes I had difficulties to talk with them; I did not know what to talk about in order to let them enjoy the time spending at the FLC and sometimes it was difficult to handle them (haha). At first, I held back myself from talking about some random topics because I was afraid that something that we talk about might offend them unintentionally. However, kids started to approach me by themselves and wanted to know about me, asking where and what do I study.

Secondly, I tried to compare kids in elementary schools in my country and here in the U.S. What I learned from my observation is that when kids who speak different language than English come to the U.S., they become very open-minded and obtain an important skill of expressing themselves. Contrary, in my country, kids in elementary schools are taught discipline first. Therefore, most of the times, kids become introverted, which I personally do not like about our education system.

Finally, on my last experience I mentioned about how a girl started to teach me Spanish, but unfortunately, I haven't seen her coming to the FLC lately. So basically, nobody else taught me Spanish ever since then. Since I came to the FLC, I worked mostly with little girls and I was curious to know how would it be to work with little boys because I thought there would definitely be some sort of different ways of learning. So, finally I had to work with a little boy, which was very fun! That boy was quick in Math, he tried to recall how did he solve that problem in class whereas when I worked with girls, they tried to read the instruction again and again and follow the instructions. In addition, as I have observed, mostly their way of speaking is more likely to be considered as SAE, even though we were told in the lecture that there is actually no such thing as SAE and nobody speaks like that. It seemed like they speak in full sentences unlikely adults native and non-native speaker.

Overall, I am enjoying this opportunity to both help little kids and observe myself too.

Blog Post 3

Working with Family Learning Center has become one of the wonderful experiences in my university life so far. When I come to the FLC, for the first five or ten minutes I just sit there and observe how do those kids interact with each other. Depending on their gender, age and friendship, they treat each other differently. Boys to boys talk usually goes openly and with jokes or topics related to the specific games either on their phones or computers. Whereas girls to girls talk tend to be more hidden (talking about some secrets or gossiping) or asking if they have Facebook or Snapchat. It seemed like a social norm, where boys behaved like boys, talking about games, and girls behaved like girls, gossiping and sharing their secrets.

One of the pleasant things working with those kids was that they helped me to communicate with them when I had a trouble. For example, there was a time when I could not understand a girl even though she repeated herself for the second time, therefore, for the third time she slowed down and repeated her sentence one more time, but very clearly this time.

This time I would like to make a correction of what I have said last time, which is basically kids speak SAE*. I realized that they are very quick at catching up new words or slangs. For example, they use 'nah' instead of 'no'. Also, it was funny to talk to a little girl who constantly used 'like' in her conversation. We have talked about this kind of situation in the lecture, which was sort of criticizing kids these days because of their use of word 'like' in almost every single sentence, which destroys the language (to be honest, I use the word 'like' as much as she uses it).

In addition, I wanted to mention that I realized how powerful and important the language is in our lives. Today, before I went to the FLC I had a little bit of disappointment, however, the FLC welcomed volunteers with appreciation snacks, and a girl was waiting for volunteers to come in and grab one for themselves. Later, another girl draw an ice-cream cone and gave it to me. We did not communicate with each other a lot, but receiving a pretty drawing was no different than having a good conversation. Lastly, another little girl complimented me, which, unexpectedly, made me happy. It was a very good timing, which made the rest of my day. I am really grateful that I had a chance to be part of the FLC.