My continuous day at Bailey Gatzert

The class today ran quite normally. The main teacher was absent from school and she asked someone else to helped her lead the class. However, I could obviously see the reaction of the kids towards the new teacher. They tent not to follow the teacher's direction quickly as thier primary teacher's and we needed more time to put all the kids in order. They practiced hand-writing today that most of them hardly classify the difference between uppercase and lowercase letters. I think this was the result of the lack of reading and practicing hand-writing at home.

The Brain Train Section contained mostly mathematics excersizes that the kid I worked with found a little bit difficult. She was good at plus formula but performed poorly in substraction. During the computer lab duration, all the kids enjoyed playing games related to their maths practices that they found much more interesting.

Would you like some salsa?

I came to the class with lots of surprise today! During the daytime class, there was a chef coming to the class room performing the Salsa preparation. I could see the excitement and eagerness in the kids' faces because this was the second time an adult came to the class performing real life character. The kids sat around in circle and intensively observed the chef mixing tomatoes, corns, beans, peppers and oil together. Along the time, the kids learned about different types of vegetables and colors as well. They were also excited because the chef asked them questions about their real life at home, their lunches and housework helping their parents. I believe today was the best day I got so far at Bailey Garzert because I could obviously observe the use of applying acquisition into learning. James Paul Gee's suggestion about the balance of acquisition and learning was clearly used by the teacher to reduce the gap between the primary discourse and secondary discourse of non mainstream children.

During Brain Train Program, I worked with two kids and both of them were nonmainstream children. One was Vietnamese American and one was Filipino. This time there was an obvious example of mathematical skills in Asian kids that I could see. Unlike my last time kid who had difficulties applying mathematics formula, the two kids today were really good at maths. They can solve addition and subtraction over ten units and calculated inside their heads instead of counting fingers. Ii was really surprised by their abilities. In the computer lab section, the kids also learned to master their maths skills by playing the computer games. For example, if they had an equation like 3+4+4=10, they had to add 3 birds, 4 lions, 4 monkeys and 10 houses to complete the tasks. This game was really useful and beneficial because the kids can connect maths with their own imagination.

At the end of the day, I also had chance to talk with the teacher of my daily class. She advised me to be strict and firm with children in order to get their respect and force them into disciplines. She was like two different people, a strict teacher in class hour and a friendly warming woman outside of class. In my own opinion, I did not quite agree with the teacher. During my time volunteering in Vietnam, I always treated kids as my friends and considered them as my peers. This method helped me shortened the distance and made the kids more responsible and confident.