Newspaper Entrepreneurs

My favorite lesson was our final and most recent visit. Our lesson was focused on newspapers. George and I brought in a copy of the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. We defined what a headline was, and the purpose of a newspaper article. Our game here was the 5W's. We explained the importance of the elements who, what, where, why, and when to gathering information necessary for a news story. This became difficult because most of boys in the class just started coloring on the newspapers by drawing mustaches, darkening eyes, or what was a real hit was putting boobs on every man in the newspaper. It showed that these kids could be in different moods at any time. This was by far the most wound up we saw the kids. They had a lot of trouble paying attention, especially because our class is so large we had 4 different tables of students working on their own story. For obvious reasons the teacher used this time to correct students work and being just two people George and I had to shuffle back and forth between all the 4 tables of students.

A few girl in the class however were very intelligent. About 5 of them grouped together and picked an article about ballerinas, and were able to depict the information about it. They even pretended they were ballarinas and began to twirl around. Whereas some other students have very poor reading abilities, and need to be guided through the process. One student in particular, Alijandro, I feel really benefited from our volunteer work. Numerous lessons I would work 1-on-1 with Alijandro to help him understand what was going on. At one point he sat down in front of the chalk board to copy notes exactly. He really wanted to learn, at times he would nearly break down in tears asking for help. It was evident that he was so upset he did not know what was going on, and by giving him a little extra help made me feel better about the JA program.