Note: I will not be reflecting on the last session (session 10) because my original tutee, Jayven, was absent. I was not able to actively teach or even build rapport with a child because there were too many of us (four) who were assigned with only one child.

Tutee’s basic information:

Name: Kledan Ilomibao

Sex: Male

Age: 9 years old

Grade level & Section: Grade 2 – Isaiah

After over thinking for quite a while, I have finally decided to just blog about the unsettling feelings and lingering guilt of unintentionally not attending the session last April 3.

I want to start this by apologizing to both my student and my teachers. I’m sorry po. I really didn’t intend to suddenly not show up last Monday, but I’m not going to excuse myself from my mistake. It is my duty to be present in every session because I have a student whom I am responsible for. I’m sorry po. I made a promise in the beginning of this semester that I will always be in attendance unless there is a plausible reason against it. Shamefully, the reason why I was absent last session doesn’t have any hint of reasonability. Truth be told, I was absent because I missed my alarm(s) and overslept. I’m sorry po. It is really embarrassing for me to admit this seemingly silly reason, but it’s the truth—something that I’m adamant not to repeat again. T_____T

Last March 20, I was one of the unfortunate student tutors who were not able to catch up to our tutees who were on their way home. Apparently, our tutees were dismissed early because if I’m not mistaken, it was the last day of their classes.

I was extremely saddened by this because if it were their last day, then does that mean Jayven wouldn’t come to school EVER again? Was last week’s session our very last session? But I haven’t done that much impact to his learning yet. Aside from that, we haven’t even said our farewells yet! This is an unfinished business!

These are the thoughts that were running in my mind. I almost had the urge to ask Jayven’s homeroom teacher about his residential address so that I can go fetch him myself. Before I could carry this out however, our professors advised us to finish our Focus Group Discussions instead—something I wasn’t able to participate in because I was running late that morning.

That being said, I decided to head back to College of Education to continue the FGD with my other supposed group participants. Once I arrived, however, my supposed group was already discussing. Hence, I didn’t have a choice but to create my own FGD with another lone person who didn’t have a group—Raeven.

Raeven and I share the same sentiments when it comes to the weaknesses and needs of our tutees. Both our tutees have a very little phonological awareness with vowels, and they often interchange e and i, and o and u. Thus, we both felt the need to provide supplementary activities that can help resolve this.

Unlike my tutee, one of Raeven’s tutees always seems to get distracted. And Raeven’s insight on how she handles this struck me the most during our FGD. According to her, she uses the behaviourist approach which is using reinforcements to make her tutee more attentive in their sessions. Hearing her use this strategy wasn’t the thing that shocked me; it was her negative outlook towards using it. It was as if she was embarrassed of herself for using operant conditioning as a strategy to get the attention of her tutee.

In a way, I realized how some strategies are perceived as “bad” by a lot of education students probably because of how these strategies are presented in their respective classes. I just wish that this connotation would be eliminated because for me, this is a misconception. These strategies exist and continue to thrive for a reason, and this reason goes to the fact that they are effective to some students.

1. Jayven’s engagement in the literacy lessons with regards to:

Attention, Effort and Attitude

          In this particular session, Jayven was remarkably engaged as he asked me questions about the instructions of the activity worksheets. He also suggested some alternatives on how we could do the “pabitin” activity more exciting for him.

          Essentially, Jayven’s attention to the lesson, effort to accomplish the tasks, and attitude towards me and others have been vastly consistent. As a student majoring in Special Education, I am exposed to kids with short attention span to no task commitment at all. But with Jayven, I never had to think of strategies that I need to incorporate when teaching the lessons because he already has an attitude that is attentive and determined to learn. But even though Jayven doesn’t require me any teaching quirks to learn effectively, I noticed in this session that he would sometimes take a peek at what Claire, another student tutor, and her tutee was doing whenever Claire would bring out stickers and other fun bonuses. I realized here that I should step up my game so that Jayven would really enjoy our session and not see his every Monday as a “boring extracurricular learning” day.

2. Jayven’s display of:

a. Understanding of the lesson

Jayven doesn’t have any problem with the letters Mm and Aa. He has shown his competency by correctly uttering the letter sounds and by sorting various images according to the beginning letter. We went through every activity in our lesson plan smoothly and with ease.

b. Motivation and interest in learning literacy skills and others

In this session, I somehow observed how Jayven wasn’t that enthusiastic anymore with the activities compared to our previous sessions. I think the reason behind this was because the activities more or less have the same concept: reading wordless picture books, grouping pictures according to beginning sound, encircling pictures that start with a particular letter, and so on. And honestly these activities do not challenge Jayven. Thus, I had the feeling that Jayven was “stuck” doing these activities that do not really benefit him anymore because he already knows them.

There were even moments when I would emphasize the sounds of the letters Mm and Aa (because that is the objective of the lesson plan) and Jayven would display a look on his face as if saying, “paulit-ulit nalang, naaral na natin yung letter M na yan.”

3. Challenges and strategies during the literacy lesson + 4. Changes

As I have mentioned above, keeping Jayven challenged is a challenge for me especially when the topic of the lesson plan does not challenge him at all. Jayven has certain weaknesses with letter sounds that are not met because the objectives of the lesson plan provided target something else entirely. As usual, I provide him supplementary activities whenever we finish early (which is all the time). In this particular session, we played a game wherein my objective was to expand his vocabulary and widen his phonological awareness with vowels. This game is called, “eye spy” with a twist. So the gist of the game is that we would “hunt” for objects around the court that starts with the vowels a, e, i, o, u. All in all, I think the game helped strengthen Jayven’s phonological distinction between e and i.