Personal Narrative: My Service Learning Experience

I had planned on doing all three service learning opportunities, but the weather chose differently for that last opportunity. With those unfortunate events at hand I will only talk about the two opportunities that I did get to complete. The first service learning that I got to partake in was the 5k run. Although, I wasn’t a part of the volunteers who got to interact with all of the families I still gathered a valuable experience. I was among the volunteers who set up everything for the race. I also brought my girlfriend along to help me with this project. At first when we got there, they told us that everything needed to be off of the truck before we could start setting up. After everything was off the truck everyone was given an area to work …show more content…
All of us who signed up went to an elementary school to help teach children about proper dental care. It was dental day so we had lesson plans centered on teeth and all the tools needed to take care of teeth. The age ranges that we worked with were from 4th grade to 5th grade. My partner and I had 9 students at a time within our group. It was pretty hectic at first, but then we started to transition smoothly from one poster to the next. Although, we didn’t get to cover all the topics because we still had some posters remaining when our time was up. Our lesson plans were well thought out and organized with different examples to show the …show more content…
As a teacher you have to have a plan for every outcome in your classroom and you have to be resourceful and adapt to everything situation. On dental day it was a lot to handle. We had to keep up with all the children in our group and make sure that everyone had a chance to engage in each activity. We didn’t have all the materials needed for all the experiments so we had to improvise. There were a lot of posters and we barely got through with half of them. It takes a lot of work and preparation to be a successful future teacher. One key thing that I have observed from this experience is there will always be a diverse set of children. Not only will there be diverseness by just ethnicity in the classroom, but also by learning styles. Another key point that I gained through this experience was you need a community to help you. You need families involved, other teachers, and supervisors to help you. It is important to have service learning projects for the experience itself. To work out possible teaching techniques that you would possibly use. Since I will be working with a small age group I would probably tell my students about potential service learning possibilities but it won’t be mandatory. Only because four to six year olds are heavily dependent on their parents. If there parents can’t get onboard with their child’s request I probably won’t get a big