Change for Kids

On Friday,  I worked with a new teacher and a new group of Kindergardeners. They seemed to be more well behaved than the first class I worked with and a bit more eager to learn. First I was given a poster of the alphabet and my goal was to get the children to be able to recognize the letter when they say it and to sound it out. I was assigned to work with 5 children and it was kind of difficult. There’s always that one bossy child who wants you to do it the way they normally do it in class and then there’s those two children who are too occupied with other things and start arguing over it and of course  you have the wild kids who would rather push it other than pay attention. But, even with all of that we still managed to get through a significant amount of the letters. The only way I really was able to get them to pay attention was to threaten to take away their “free time” and those kids love their free time so they quieted down very quickly.

The later activity I did was much more successful than the first. I practiced recognizing and reading one syllable words with another group of 3 children. We went over simple words like cat, bat, hat, and sat and even though they were able to sound out all the letters they didn’t seem to be able to sound out the words. So I tried things like asking them “what do all the words have in common” and how to sound out “at” when you see it. It took a lot of repetition but in the end they were able to sound it out and even spell out the words that i give them orally. It was a nice feeling that they were actually learning something and it made me very proud of them.