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  • Essay / Volunteering with Cmla's Write Suff program: my personal experience

    For this project, I was part of CMLA's innovative Write Suff program. The program connects MCLA volunteer mentors with students in grades 5-7 from North Adams' three local elementary schools. Elementary students come to the MCLA campus and participate in an activity or session, then write an assignment on what they did or learned. It was a great opportunity for children to get involved outside of their primary school and learn to write at the same time. I chose to be part of Write Stuff for my project because I saw it as a great opportunity to be with children and be able to analyze their behavior during activities, but also to be able to teach them something new in the process and in this case I was teaching them to write. Going into this experience, I wondered if I would really learn enough from the children to be able to write this article about it. But looking at it now, I can see that there are many things you can learn by simply observing and analyzing the simple things that children say and do. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay While interacting with an eleven year old at The Write Stuff, I learned and found interesting the effect of education on the daily life of a child. life. I was talking to a little boy about the school he went to and if he liked his school. The boy told me exactly what school he went to and he said he loved it because he really loved all his friends. He then went to tell me where he lived, giving me his exact address, what his house looked like and his phone number. The boy even went so far as to invite me to dinner because his mother loved meeting all of her friends. Later, when I talked to another girl who was about the same age, I asked her the same question. After she responded, I asked her if her parents had talked to her about disclosing personal information to strangers and she told me that her parents had specifically told her to keep personal information to herself. When she told me this, I went back to the little boy because I was curious. I asked him if his parents told him not to divulge information and he simply said, “No.” When normal events like this happen, I usually don't think about it too much because it doesn't really matter, but since I'm on a mission and watching for things like this to happen , that caught my attention. In situations like this, you can see that education has an effect on a child's daily life. By definition, education is the care and encouragement of growth and development. The way you are raised by your parents is represented by your actions and represented in the things you do daily. As humans, we are a product of our environment around us, so if we were raised by different parents or in a different region, we would be completely different people than we are today. I saw an example of this while I was talking to these two fifth graders. One of the boys' parents didn't make it a point to tell him to keep his personal information private, so he went ahead and gave me everything. Who knows who else this little boy could have given this information to. He thought it was innocent, but it's actually a serious problem because we wouldn't want this boy to give this information to the wrong person. The parentsof this boy made their son feel safe around everyone and that's why he gave me his information. Her parents, meanwhile, told the girl that she should not share information because it could fall into the wrong hands. She knew something bad could happen if she revealed the information, so she kept it to herself. Although these two children are the same age and are both in fifth grade, they have two different opinions on the same subject. This is because their level of education was different. We can assume that the boys' parents were more permissive parents and thought nothing of it, while the girls' parents were more authoritarian and made sure their daughter knew not to divulge personal information. Their level of education had a huge effect on what they thought was right and wrong as well as their cognitive development. One child thought what he was doing was right because he was never told not to do it while the other knew it was wrong. I found this really interesting because it's not something I would usually notice or sit and think about. This really highlights the effect that your level of education can have on your entire life. It's just one small aspect of a child's life out of a million different aspects, so who knows what other differences like this we may find. I also wonder about the future of these children; will the girl grow up to be more protective of her life than the boy because she was told not to divulge information because something bad might happen because of it? For me, talking with his little boy confirmed what we were talking about in class. We always talk about how the way you were raised and the environment we grow up in shapes who we are as a person and shapes our actions. The experience I had with this little boy sharing his personal information proved to me that we are the product of the environment we grow up in and that education has a huge effect on the way we act and what we say. Another thing I learned is how successful the scaffolding process is overall. Just as scaffolding in the normal world is a temporary structure used to support workers on the side of a building, scaffolding in psychology is a teaching process that involves providing resources and support to students in the learning new concepts. As students develop skills in these areas, supports are gradually removed so that the student can complete a task without assistance. In class we talked about scaffolding and I considered what we learned, but I didn't completely believe it was an effective way to teach a child particular topics simply because I feel like it takes time and isn't the most effective way to help. someone. While working with one of the Write Stuff children, I discovered that scaffolding is an effective teaching method. One of the kids I was helping with writing was having trouble writing down everything he did throughout his day in writing order. It was supposed to start from the moment he woke up to the moment he was next to me writing down what he had done. Since he was having difficulty, I decided to try using the scaffolding method to help him. I started by just asking him what the first thing he did every morning was, I didn't want to give him the answer but I wanted to guide him. He said he woke up. I asked himwhat was the next thing he did and he said he got out of bed. When I asked him what he did next, he didn't remember. He just remembers eating breakfast and going to school. I told the little boy that he was missing intermediate steps and he still couldn't think of anything he was missing. I pointed to his shirt and asked him when he put it on, and he immediately remembered several steps he had forgotten to write down. As he wrote this list, I gave him less and less help and eventually he was able to do it all on his own. This was the process of scaffolding, and it showed me that my preconceptions about scaffolding were incorrect. I thought scaffolding wasn't the best way to teach because it was time consuming, but it only took me a few minutes to use scaffolding to teach this little boy to write a list of things he he made it throughout his day without missing any steps. After actually participating and witnessing the scaffolding, I believe it is a very accurate way to teach a child a specific topic or concept. I think phasing out support from a child is a great way to get the child to learn to work on their own and be more independent. This is very important for children in grades 5-7 as they are highly dependent on their parents and friends. When I used scaffolding to teach this boy to write about his day, he learned effectively and quickly and it was an amazing thing to see first hand after being skeptical. I learned a lot from this experience. Although we've talked a lot about scaffolding in class, it's always more effective to learn things when you're actually participating. I feel like I use scaffolding a lot in my everyday life when helping people and when I've helped people in the past as well, I never noticed that I was using it previously. Keep in mind: This is only a sample. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay One last thing I learned while volunteering for the Write Stuff program is not that of 'a specific interaction with a child, but this is what I learned from the different types of teaching strategies I observed. A few times I went to the program, I simply observed how the mentors interacted with their mentees. There are different teaching styles: permissive, uninvolved, authoritarian and authoritarian. By observing these different teaching styles, I saw the effect it had on the child's interest in the curriculum and their overall learning. The teaching style I saw the most was the authoritarian style. The authoritarian style includes high expectations and standards of behavior, consistent enforcement of rules, and inclusion of children in decision-making. For me, this is the most effective teaching style, so I'm happy to say this is the one I've seen the most. Many mentors were strict with the children in that they had to follow the rules and do the writing assignments, but they were also kind to the children and gave them the choice of what they wanted to write and guided them along the way. throughout the process. They also participated in guided activities with the mentees and had a lot of fun with them. The next teaching style I saw present was the permissive style. The permissive style is characterized by emotional warmth but few expectations or standards for children's behavior. There were one or two mentors who seemed.