Prompt #1: My School

When I first learned of my placement for the Service Learning Project, I was a little concerned about the area I would be volunteering in. On the morning we were two start, I picked up some fellow volunteers and we made our way to XYZ Elementary. All I could think of was how different the surroundings were from what I was used to. The entrance seemed to be closed and I didn’t know exactly where to go from there, fortunately, we were able to find our way. The school looked very nice on the outside.
We went inside and asked to find our coordinator and it looked nice inside too. White walls, but many different colors on doors and stairs. We went upstairs to our coordinator, Mrs. Bryant, and she assigned us to classrooms and we went in to observe. Our first stop was in kindergarten. The kindergarten classroom was very nice. It was a large room, with a white board in the front, filled with learning materials; calendar, number line, letters, animal names, etc. The class had about 20 students. There was one teacher, Mrs. Smith, along with one teacher assistant. This was an ESL classroom and the students were of many different ethnicities. A kindergarten classroom needs to be controlled. The teacher has a nice way to get the children to do what they are supposed to. Every time they are going to get a new direction, they must sit on the rug. Mrs. Smith will sing a version of the ABC’s song and when the children hear this, they will sit quietly on the rug, ready for the next instruction. This was a refreshing tactic to control the students in a fun way. It is also something that I can learn from as an aspiring teacher.
Our next stop was our first grade classroom. The students in this classroom were friendlier than in kindergarten where I felt the students were afraid to be around us. The students always like to include us in what they are doing and try to make us feel welcome. I feel like this is the main value in this classroom, to make people feel welcome. This classroom is very similar to the kindergarten room, except the white board, instead of being filled with learning materials, there was a lot more open space, which the teacher uses to write. This classroom also has about 20 students, also of all different ethnicities, so I can’t help to think that because this is a regular education, not an ESL , classroom, the students were quicker to recognize as non-threatening, which is why they were able to recognize and include us. It will be interesting to see if these values hold true through the remainder of my time at XYZ Elementary.