Prompt #2 Claude Goldenberg

I spend the major of my time in my kindergarten class with Mrs. C. The class size is around twenty students approximated evenly divided between boys and girls, however even though it might be divided gender wise, it is still an extremely diverse group of students. Twelve students are African American, 3 white, 5 Spanish/Latino, and 2 Japanese. Of all the weeks I have volunteered there, I have only seen white teachers, as well as a white principal and white secretary. After observing for a couple weeks, I did take it upon myself to do some behind the scenes research on the Infoworks website. (www.infoworks.ride.uri.edu/) and saw that the majority of the students were African-Americans and \Hispanics. Most of these students live in poverty. While being my kindergarten class i noticed that there is mostly Hispanic children and a few African American students and maybe 1 or 2 white students in the class. On the days I volunteer, I have the opportunity to be able to go to two classrooms, I spend a good majority of my time in Kindergarten and then a little over a half hour in first grade. Looking at the dynamic of my classroom I see that there are more African American student in my Kindersargen class, as well as Spanish/Latino in comparison to my first grade class which consists mostly of Latino students. One week I go to school really early and noticed how much the students work with each other
The other day when I was working with my three kindergarten children, I was listening to another group doing the CVC words and the teacher assistant explain the directions, but she was bilingual and she had a couple of the students that were fully fluent in their home language, but they still fully understood English as well, but they needed to work with her so that there was no miscommunication among the work. As I was watching my children and keeping them busy working on their work, I was taking an overall look at the others groups and how they all interacted with one another. I was watching other children that were finding the work easy, helping peers that were stuggling a bit. I can relate this to myself and my own personal experiences in school, sometimes just listening to the teacher I don’t understand the message that is trying to be portrayed, but after hearing another class member or consulting with a friend I understand the information better.
So an example of this is the children in the other group that I was just observing were talking in a different language to help one another, but then it got the point across because the children knew what they were being asked and they didn’t feel slighted. Some children probably felt insecure that they were speaking in a different language and having someone else overhearing then, might have made them nervous, but there teacher assistant had assured them that it was ok, and that it is good to help one another because that’s how you grow and learn.
This experience made me think of Claude Goldenberg. The reason that this experience made me think of him is because he said it that “teachers need to be effective and how the teachers need to help the students more that English is not there first language, and that they might not use it unless in school.” the more they use it the more they will be comfortable using it and won’t even have to think about when to speak it and when not to. Just observing the other group not my own, I could pin point some of the children that have had more exposure to the English language, and the ones that were looking at words like they were foreign, which in some cases they probably were. After reading the article by Goldenberg he states that the children will learn from their experiences and if it is difficult for them they will get motivated and want to be able to learn and do well with it. As being trained to be a teacher in the making I want my children to feel comfortable with knowing a different language, as well as being well versed in English, so that they are conscious of what is going on.