Oasis Reflection

Introduction

In the past few months I’ve had the unique opportunity to do something for the very first time. I tutored, mostly Kindergarten, but it was the first time that I have been in that type of setting. For much of my life I have been around kids, whether it be in church or basketball camps and I’ve always been helping them try to learn something. In church, we were always teaching them about the bible and in basketball it was rules, form, and how to play. Never have I taught using theories because I was unaware of theories until now. In this paper, I will explain how I changed my teaching to help young Hispanic students at Oasis learn more efficiently and how their progress showed that it was working.

Field Experience Site (Oasis) I

Oasis is a small area where one teacher is helping two maybe four students. This makes it easier for us as the educator to round up the students when they were misbehaving or wondering away from the topic. In my field experiences I noticed how interested the students were to get to know you. The first time meeting them they would ask you questions about your name and usually the guys would ask if you had a girlfriend or not. It was a good relief to know that the students where just as interested in me as I were them. Upon starting the work we would have them sit down a read out of a book. Since I was mostly in Kindergarten it was more of a guided reading and they followed along. A couple of the students were able to also read the book along with me but some would just have more a confused look; mostly just looking at pictures. I fixed this by helping them sound out words and phrases to read the book with me. A main focus I tried to implement is establishing a positive mental set at the beginning of each day and lesson. This allowed the students to become more ready for the lesson and become more interested in the lesson from the start. Another way that I did this was once the book was finished I would hand them a piece of paper and let them draw out or re-write their favorite part of the book. This allowed them to review the book and see what we had just talked about. I never tried to put

According to Yilmaz, “discovery learning encourages students to discover principles and important relationships by engaging them in such activities as asking questions, formulating hypothesis, doing experiments and research, and investigating a phenomenon (210).” Since there wasn’t really a science portion of learning at Oasis we used discovery learning mostly in reading and math. We did this mostly by asking questions and letting the students learn by either drawing out what they learned or writing what they learned. It was really helpful because the students would learn about something new that they were reading in a book then compare it to something else that they already knew about and draw them or write about them on paper. The most effective way I got my students to learn, other than motivation through candy, was to give them paper and give them a free range of whatever they wanted to draw or write about in a story. It got them engaged in the story and allowed them to ask me for guidance if they were confused about