Internship-The Final Week!

Describe your reflections on your internship project—what went well, what would you do differently, and what stands out to you?

My project was working with a little girl, Esmeralda,* who is a first grader and is struggling with keeping up with her peers. I first learned about Esmeralda when Sarah Barnes, my mentor, suggested I work with her for my project. She told me she was a first grader who really needed help learning how to read, write, and do simple math. She is the daughter of a single mother who works hard to provide for herself and her daughters. I found myself blaming the parents for a lot of the things that I saw was wrong with her students. Now I realize that even though it is the parents fault some of the times, it is not always because they choose to not spend time with their kids. I even began to feel a little big hopeless because I wished that her mom had more spare time that she could spend helping her daughter do her homework. When I first started working with her I was surprised to see just how much she needed to learn to catch up to her classmates. The students at room 1 had been working on writing books, but her book was mostly filled with pictures. When I did my first assessment with her to see how much she knew, I was surprised to see that even though she knew the names of all of her letters, she didn't know the sounds that most of them made. My goal was to get her to at least recognize the sounds that some of the letters made. My first method of trying to get her to learn this was reading to her and getting her to recognize some of the letters in the book and telling her what sounds it made. I would also have her follow along with her finger as I read to her which was going great, until she got bored and stopped wanting to read. I realized that to get her attention I was going to need a different method of teaching. This is when I began taking my work home. I wanted to make Esmeralda want to work with me so I made a game that we could play. I ended up making a matching game out of construction paper and pictures of random things in my house. I would put a letter on one card and I would put a picture of something that started with that letter in another card. She really liked to play this game with her friends, but would get really frustrated when her friends would beat her at the game and would give up playing. It took a lot of convincing to get her to start playing again, but after a while she started getting the hang of the game and when she started winning, she wanted to play more often. What I would do differently is I would have tried to work on more games with her. Towards the end more people started to work individually with her and I had less time with her on my hands. She started doing different activities with different people and would usually tell me what she wanted to work on. Usually she would say that she wanted to play the same game and since I saw improvements I didn't bother changing my strategies. I also would have recorded her progress more. I made a chart for how much she knew in the beginning and how much she knew in the end and even though her improvements were obvious, I just wish I would have been recording more during the process of teaching her everything I did. Overall, I feel my project was a success and I got farther than I had expected to. Not only does she know most of the sounds the letters make now, but she even sounds out words now. She is beginning to keep up with her work at school now because she understand what she is working on at school. I feel this was a good project with me and I just wish I had more evidence of what we worked on.

*names have been changed.