My Field Experience Analysis

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My Field Experience: Connections to Educational Psychology During the tutor orientation, Sister Margarita explained the schedule we had to follow while with the students. Every classroom had activity boxes that pertained to the grade level we were tutoring in that included things that were being taught at school. In the first grade room, the boxes had items like flashcards (adding, subtracting, ABCs, etc.), a small analog clock to practice time, 4 of the same picture books, and more. After arriving, I would grab some pencils and a couple blank sheets of paper from the tutor bin. I would then make up some type of writing exercise to practice vocabulary, writing proper sentences, or answering questions after reading a short paragraph (given …show more content…

I loved witnessing what we talked about in the classroom being put to practice at Oasis. The first graders were towards the end of the preoperational stage of development—ages 2 to 7. This term, coined by Jean Piaget, is defined as “the stage at which children learn to represent things in the mind” (Slavin 34). Robert E. Slavin, an educational psychologist, also mentioned how children in this stage have a greater ability to think about things and can use symbols to mentally represent objects. I saw this a lot when we pulled out flashcards to work on counting money and telling time. They were able to use skills they learned in class to be able to count the minutes and hour hand on the clock. They were also able to count the money by thinking about how much each type of coin would cost and remembering what their teacher taught them about money. In EDUC 2130, in chapter two of “Educational Psychology: Theory and Practice”, the author briefly talked about sign systems and how it effects a child’s cognitive development. Sign systems are symbols that have been created to help people communicate with others, contemplate within themselves, and help solve problems. Lev Vygotsky (a Russian psychologist) said that these sign systems—a culture’s language, writing systems, counting systems, etc.—are extremely vital to an individual’s early development. My students used flashcards (symbols) to practice simple things like counting change, telling time, and practicing addition and subtraction. There was also a bulletin board that had numerous pictures of different types of workers (i.e. a nurse, a construction worker, a teacher, a librarian, etc.) and the students had to figure out what each person did for a living and then write a sentence about the

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