Final Reflection

One of my favorite things about the service learning assignment was making connections between what I was observing and what I was learning. One of my favorite things we learning about in this course was how to engage students. I did most of my service learning in a first grade classroom, and first grade students need a lot of engaging! It was fun to see the different ways to engage learners that we talked about in class, in my service learning! I especially liked talking about how technology can help engage students, because I see technology used in the classroom all the time! 

I think blogging has really helped me articulate what I learned from my service learning. Sometimes it is hard for me to get all my ideas down on paper because I can’t write as fast as my brain thinks! So sometimes I lose ideas in my head while I am writing down other ideas. But blogging has helped me get all my ideas down before I forget them. 

Blogging has also helped me think deeper about what I am seeing in the classroom. Often, while I am writing a blog, more ideas will come to me about what I saw in the classroom and how it relates to what we learned. And usually those ideas I get while I’m writing are better than my original ideas! I also try to read the blog prompts before I go into the classroom so I know exactly what to look for. That has helped me be more observant when I am sitting in the classroom. 

I think the main difference between my first blog post and my last is my content. I think that as the semester went on, I started thinking deeper about what we were learning. I started to find it easier to make connections between what I was learning and what the first graders were doing.