Service Learning with Our Next Generation

For this particular service learning project I have decided to research the group that I have been working with and what kind of activities we have been doing throughout the semester. The group that I have been working with is a math group that works and basic math skills, such as multiplication, division, and addition. The way the students are picked to be in this particular group depends on the math skills that they have shown in their math classes in school. Most of the students are third through fifth graders who struggle with their basic math skills.

The adults that run this particular group of the Our Next Generation are retired teachers. Both teachers have many years in experience on working with students. The main leader of the group is a gym teacher who has made up different activities to bring physical work and relate them to math. This is a good way for getting the kids to do physical activity but still learn basic math skills at the same time. He has found ways to make many of these activities a competition which gives the kid incentives to do their best and have fun. I feel that this is good to keep the kids interest since they have just come from being at school all day and the last thing they want to do is more school work.

The secondary teacher that works with this group is a retired math teacher and now does individual tutoring when he is not working with Our Next Generation. He has many years in experience teaching all levels of math classes. He helps with teaching the kids more of the basics with math and how different rules work and why. He also does a lot of one on one with the students in the class. I believe that this is a good thing since a lot of these kids may not get as much one on one when they are in class compared to a smaller group like the one we are working in.

Lastly working with these groups of kids are the student volunteers. Many of the students are University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee students are Marquette University students that volunteer for various service learning groups. There are also many Marquette High School kids that have to volunteer so many hours for school with specific groups such as Our Next Generation. The student volunteer’s jobs are to assist the adults and to help the students with various tasks and activities they are to perform throughout the semester.

Film Final

There are many things that I learned throughout this semester while volunteering with Our Next Generation. I have worked with many different individuals, some of them students that I worked with on different activities that are school related. I also worked with adults that have a lot of experience in teaching and working with young kids. Through the semester I worked in a group with students on Mondays and Wednesdays in a math group. I worked with students that have fallen behind in their math classes in school and come to this after school program to work and on math and try to catch up with other students in their classes.

One thing that I have learned through this program is to not take anything for granted. There are a lot of these we take advantage of and assume that other students can do. There are many things that these young children have not been thought and we cannot believe that is the case. Just because most of us have been taught this at a very young age doesn’t mean that these students had the same experience that we did while we were in school. It has taught me to work harder with these kids because I want them to be able to do all these math problems that I was able to do when I was their age.

Another thing that I took away from this service learning project is the people that I worked with. There were a lot of people that I worked with that cared more about helping these young students then they did about making money or helping themselves. They were giving their time to work with these students and think up different activities for these students. These retired teachers that I worked with spent a lot of time away from the actually group planning and getting different small gifts for the kids to make them want to learn. I also worked with great students. These kids were just coming from all day of school but yet they gave us their time and concentration for us to work with them and help them get better in math.

Overall I took a lot away from this service learning project. I and honored to have worked with a lot of these young students and some of these other volunteers. It has helped me and I hope that I have been able to help some these students and helped them get better as people and students. I am glad that I did this service learning and gave my time to Our Next Generation.