PAWS Reflection Paper

This semester I got the opportunity to work two days a week with an organization called PAWS. PAWS is a post secondary awareness program that teaches 4th and 5th grade students the importance of going to college and how to get to college. Almost all the students that attend this after school program are from low income families. Majority of the students come from broken homes, live with someone other than their parents, and are considered title one. I would estimate that 94% of the students were African-American while 2% were Hispanic and only 4% were white. For me, this was a complete culture shock because I have never worked with students like this. When I first started with PAWS I floated around and worked with different students. As the semester continued I primarily worked with one fifth grade group. The students I worked with were mainly girls and occasionally a few boys. On average I would only work with 2-3 students at a time. …show more content…
We took the students on a tour/scavenger hunt of the campus. One day we even got to take the students into the library and did a lesson on the computer about job placement. Each week we would do something new that involved college. I helped one week with a college fair. We had over 20 colleges set up for the students to look at. I also helped teach the basics of college terminology like GPA, ACT, dorms, and scholarship. My favorite activity we did was when we set up a mock college experience. Each student was assigned a ACT score and from there it decided their GPA and how much scholarship they would receive. Next the students had to decide on a budget for dorms, meal plans, and books. There were also other parts to this activity that really simulated what college was like. The students at the end loved the pretend graduation ceremony we had for them because they completed pretend