Spring 2016, 2nd prize winner
Blog Post 1
I have been volunteering at Columbine Elementary School as a part of their after school career pathways programs.
The first week, I was a part of the yoga after school program and I did not really get to interact with the students so I could not pick out specific linguistic patterns within their speech.
The second week, I was apart of the education and leadership career pathway pattern and it was a smaller group of students so I was able to interact with them more. One main lexical feature that I noticed between the students was that we were talking about family and one of the students said "mommy" and everyone started laughing. It was usual to everyone else because he would say "mommy" and everyone corrected him and said "no, it's mom". Most of the students were Mexican or Hispanic so the ethnicity did not cause the lexical difference. I think that it was just how the student was raised. They were probably used to saying mommy. The difference between 'mom' and 'mommy' is also that 'mom' sounds much more mature. I remember sitting my mom down and telling her that " I am going to stop calling you mommy because I am growing up and I think that it is time and mommy is not cool anymore" because I did not want to be embarrassed.
This week aka the third week, I was a part of the web design career pathways program. It was really cool seeing how much fifth graders can accomplish. This program is for fifth graders and they are suppose to come up with logo that they are creating on iPads and they are going to present their logos to a group of people. I was very surprised by some of the logos because they looked very well put together and they created the logos themselves.
I was apart of so many different programs that I got to see what the Columbine Elementary School community is about. Most of the teachers and people in the community speak Spanish, Spanglish or Chicano English because the majority of the students are Mexican or Hispanic. It amazed me how many different programs were being offered to help show and encourage students that they have a future. I also surprised many students because they all thought that I was in middle school and when I told them that I was 19, they were very surprised because of how young I looked.
I definitely look forward to start tutoring my own individual students on Tuesdays while also being a part of the web design program on Thursdays. I look forward to learning a lot more.
Blog post 2
Throughout the semester I have been volunteering at Columbine Elementary school as a part of their homework club on Tuesdays and their after school visual/web design program on Thursdays. I am getting the opportunity to get to know the students more and more as the semester progresses.
A part of the homework help club, I am only working with two or three students and the two students that are consistently going after school are both Spanish speakers while one student who recently joined is not a Spanish speaker. I think it is very interesting that since Columbine is such a huge Spanish speaking elementary school Spanish is a part of their curriculum and all of the students learn Spanish. The third student, is a white male and I tried to help him with his Spanish but I haven't learned any Spanish since freshman year of high school so I was learning as he was. He learned Spanish from a workbook and he had to do worksheets that helped him learn Spanish. As we were moving through the worksheet and workbook, I found that it was a lot harder for me to pronounce some of the words versus filling out the worksheet and learning the syntax of the language. The two other students who are Spanish speakers could read the words and pronounce it a lot easier then I could but they struggled a little with the syntax of the sentences.
Now for the web/visual design after school program I am working with about 18 students and it is very interesting to see that the majority of the program are Mexicans and the minority are white students. White and Mexicans are the only two race that are in the program and it is interesting to see the separation. Most of the students for the majority of the time are speaking in Spanish except for when they speak to me. It is much easier for the girl who is white to communicate with the other students but it is a lot harder for the two white males to communicate with the other students. The two white males are generally always working together and they do not really communicate with the other students in the program which goes back to what we were talking in class and how we speak and communicate to other people has an effect on who your friends are and who you talk to everyday.
I am excited to see how much the students can achieve by the end of the semester.
Blog Post 3
I cannot believe that it is almost the end of the semester. This semester has gone by so fast, especially with volunteering at Columbine Elementary. I am just going to jump right into the post.
Starting with the after school homework club, I work with four students. Two male students are Spanish speakers, another male student only speaks English and a female student speaks French, German, and English. It is interesting to see the different students who speak multiple languages. Almost all of the students in the school are Spanish speakers. Aaron only speaks English now but a part of their curriculum is learning Spanish. I helped him with his Spanish homework and he is starting to learn Spanish and if he sticks with it then it will really help him in the long run. Knowing more then one language is going to be very helpful in the future because multilingualism is the norm and only knowing one language is not the norm. The two boys that speak Spanish were also fascinated by the girl because she could speak a little bit of French and German. But I could tell that it was more of subtractive bilingualism. She could only count in French and knew only a few words in German because she mainly spoke English so she was loosing her heritage language which was German because of her dominant language which was English.
Now with my Career Pathways program that I work with, it is a class of all Spanish speakers so all of the students are bilingual even the teacher who is in charge of the program. After observing and speaking to a few of the students, I noticed that the majority of the class has Spanish as their first language and English as their second language. They do not exhibit subtractive bilingualism because all of the students speak both Spanish and English very well. When they are speaking to me or the teacher then they would speak in English but when they break into their own groups then they mainly speak in Spanish to one another. They mainly speak in Spanish when they do not want me to know what they are saying but I can make inferences and understand a little bit of Spanish so I could make out what they are saying. The teacher, Ms. Hutman also speaks Spanish but she mainly has grammatical competence so that she can say a few things in Spanish. A lot of the students are receptive bilinguals because they all learned Spanish and speak Spanish at home which is their heritage and from their community. Some of the students are really good at speaking Spanish and English so they are simultaneous bilinguals.
It has been really fun getting to know all the students as a group and as individuals and I cannot wait to see what they have accomplished. The media career pathways students have been working on a video for their end of the year project and I cannot wait to see their finish products because they have all worked so hard on it. It has been amazing and I can't believe that it is already the end of the semester.