Great Stories

                  In these past few months, I’ve had some really awesome experiences with the children we work with in Jumpstart that demonstrated their developmental progress while they were having fun. I love this aspect of Jumpstart where all activities are child-led and learning is fun. One great example, a few weeks back, was when we included the word “disgusting” in our lesson plan – mentioning it as a vocabulary term in our reading as well as breaking it down as a “Guess What Word I’m Saying” word, dividing it into individual phonemes. The kids didn’t seem too interested in the activity or the word that week but at the end of session, one of the children used the word disgusting correctly, which was a great surprise. Then, a few weeks later, another child brought it up when describing one of the characters of a story when he got his clothes dirty. Since then, the word “disgusting” has popped up in session periodically. Another great experience to show me that the kids are learning was when we recited the poem “Three Little Monkeys” about the monkeys and the crocodile that ate them.  The kids were really into the poem but then during sharing and goodbye, a lot of the children brought up the concepts from the poem in their artwork or writing from the day, showing that they comprehended the concepts taught in the poem. Finally, this week we saw some awesome rhyme and phonemic awareness at session when all of our kids were really into suggesting words that start with the same sounds – some of them naming words that started with the same sounds but others naming words that rhymed with the word suggested (although it’s not exactly what we were looking for with that activity it was awesome to see the understanding and development)!

~Kirsten Peterson

Corps member

Team Learning 1