The first meeting with my mentor lasted for two hours, starting from 3:30PM to 5:30PM. When I arrived at the after school program, the students were outside at the playground lining up to walk inside. They were a lot smaller than what I imagined, and my my mentor greeted me as we all walked to the portable which was convienently located within the elementary school. I received a name tag (sticker) and introduced myself to the class, where they were all either very friendly or shy.
I assisted the students with their homework when the time to do homework came up through the process of a countdown and a studying background song, which was pretty effective since the students acted accordingly to the music and my mentor. Many of the children had trouble with counting or math problems, but were able to do it when I told them to use their fingers to count or try it out on their own first and looking for my approval for the correct answer.
My mentor pointed out an isolated student to me during my drop-by, who was selectively muted to her peers and very talkative to her parents. I noticed she followed or stared at people or who she looked up to, one of which was my mentor. Hopefully during my next visits I could get her to open up more to other people, the same goal my mentor has.
After the homework period ended, each student listened for the cue of the music to clean up and prepare for the daily activity of the day, today it was an craft project using label stickers of rectangular and circular shapes as different objects like tables and desks in each student's classroom. This was an activity to also teach the children about spacial recognition and adjust sizes to fit each sticker object into their classroom, which was a sheet of graphing paper. Before the project my mentor explained the activity in a simple manner for the children to understand, stopping any questions from the kids to be answered until after the explanation was finished. All the students had access to writing utensils and scissors to better aid them in recreating their classrooms. Once the projects were complete all the students helped to clean up their tables and put the utensils away for their own individual free time.
It was a really cute first visit, all of the kids had their little quirks and I could see that a few students would be easier to handle than others. After the musical I'll definitely have more time to do my mentoring. (^__^)
