I have almost finished 10 hours in my 2nd grade class that I am helping and they are such a smart group of kids. There is a student in this class and his name is Angel. He only speaks Spanish and it is really hard to help him connect to English words when he can't vocalize what he is trying to say and have someone understand. We do have a couple of bilingual students in the class that can help, but I don't think that is is helpful to have the other students talking for him. I think he needs to learn for himself how to talk to other people. One thing that seemed to work better for communication was pictures. He obviously had to say 'and' and 'the' and words similar to that sort, and he can form basic sentences on his own, but he has a really hard forming concepts verbally. For example, he had a writing project where he was to describe something and write about it. He picked the topic of a ninja and it was really hard for him to say what he saw in English. When he had a hard time he would just kind of look around him and if everyone was understanding what was going on, he would just nod his head and say that he understood. This isn't really helpful for him because this doesn't help him learn.
This definitely reminds me on the Cognitive learning theory. I feel like his processing is similar to a computer. Information is going in, but it gets scrambled in translation and then he can't figure out how to spit it out. He is on constant overdrive and the poor kid tries so hard, but things are getting lost in his mind. I think it would be really hard to try to talk when you hardly understand what they are saying to you and even harder when you don't know how to make them understand you. He is such a sweet kid, and he can have small conversations, which a good place to start, but he can't quite figure out how to keep a conversation going.
It is really interesting to see how all of these kids learn. They all are learning at different speeds and they love to help each other learn. It's so cute and I love helping them learn. I have also noticed that I hated my student teachers all growing up but these kids love me! They tell me about what they did at recess and what they will be doing when they go home. It's so cute and I can't wait to be teacher one day!!
Maddie Brown
