Chandler Traditional Academy- Freedom
Spring Semester 60 Hours
Personal Photo
This spring semester I got the pleasure to work with kindergartners at the Chandler Traditional Academy-Freedom Campus. Over the course of 2 months I spent 55 hours with these kids. I learned with these kids, laughed with these kids, played, ate, colored, and taught these kids. There wasn't a day spent in that classroom that I did not have some sort of personal growth, or see the growth of the children around me.
I care about these kids like I do my own family, or close friends. In the few months we spent together I got to know them very well, and they were very comfortable around me. The first ten hours in the classroom were spent observing. I wanted to get a feel for the classroom, the rules, and how things were ran. Since it was a traditional academy is was a completely different environment than I have ever been in. Looking back on my kindergarten years I remember playing with blocks, finger painting, and dressing up in house while serving tea to my friends. This kindergarten is much different. The curriculum is accelerated to the year ahead, and they do not waste any class time and are constantly moving. You will not find a play house, or a sensory table, but you will find desk full of children ready to learn, and participate in what is happening in the classroom. A lot of the work I did with the kids was during centers. Each week the kindergarten teachers come up with a set of centers. There are 5 centers, one for every day of the week. There is a math center, an English center, a writing center, a listening center, and then depending what week there is a second center of one of those. The centers are fun and involve lots of coloring cutting and gluing. The children are broken into groups of 5 or 6 and spend about 25 minutes at a group a day, then rotate the next. This was a great opportunity for me to work one on one with kids who struggled a little bit with the assignment, or who had a hard time focusing on the assignment
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BPC110 4 Hours Service Learning
During my four hours of service learning for computer programming I got to help my kindergartners in the computer lap. The students really enjoyed using the website star fall which is an educational website designed to teach children their alphabet, shapes, colors, and numbers all in a fun way. The kids did not only get to have fun in the computer lab but also had to do a lot of hard work. They were introduced to the keyboard early. The students typed their spelling words out every week. Although challenging, it seemed manageable to them. The kids often felt like a letter simply wasn’t on their keyboard, or that it was lost, not that they couldn’t find them. It was a hard concept for them to grasp that every key board was made the same, and that each and every keyboard would have all 26 letters of the alphabet. They children really enjoyed their time in the computer lab each week and looked forward to going the next time they had specials there. Although there was no “computer” teacher, my service learning teacher was very knowledgeable in how to help the students if they were stuck or struggling, and how to fix minor problems with computers.