Kyli Nelson

Community Service- Reflection paper

DSU application

Community Service

Through South Dakota State University there is a school that is on campus. It is

call the Fishback Center for Early Childhood Education. The Fishback Center is

equipped with multiple classrooms, that can house multiple age groups and observation

booths for each classroom. In the spring semester of 2018, I was an assistant teacher

in the four and five year old’s classroom in the school. This entails creating specific

lessons for the children, playing with them, helping them learn and grow, and making

the classroom a safe place with a positive learning environment. I would attend the

school to be an assistant teacher every Monday and Wednesday for four hours in the

afternoon.

This experience helped me grow as an educator. It made me feel more

comfortable being in a classroom with other teachers. In the classroom I had to

cooperate with peers and I had to make decisions with the other teachers in mind.

During certain parts of the experience, the other teachers and I had to do lesson plans

together. While constructing these, we had to work together and make sure we were on

the same page, for our sake and for the children’s sake.

This experience also helped me feel more comfortable making lesson plans and

relating them to standards. Throughout this experience, I created lesson plans for math,

reading, and creative play. I didn’t always use them, but I still had the opportunity to
create them and got to practice making lesson plans. One of the lesson plans I used

was during small group. Doing this lesson plan made me grow as an educator because

it showed me my work was correct and how it is used in the classroom.

Being in the Fishback Center with the four and five year old children has also

helped me improve on the way I communicate with the children and being okay with

telling them “no”. Before this experience I had not been around young children very

often. When I first arrived at the Fishback Center at the beginning of semester, I felt

awkward and I did not know how to start engaging with them. The children taught me

how to play and how to “be silly” with them. The more I was around them, the more

comfortable I was. This experience helped me find that I am made to be an educator.

Fishback Center showed me how to conduct certain assessments in the

classroom as well. For example, I conducted an Ages and Stages assessment on a

child. To do this assessment I used observation. I gained knowledge about the different

forms of observation through this. I learned about taking notes on the child’s form of

certain activities and writing down what children say to help support my observations.

This assessment also taught me about one on one interaction with the child, asking the

child questions, seeing what he could answer and how he would answer. I also used

video and pictures to help with assessing the child’s Ages and Stages report.

Through being in the environment of the classroom at the Fishback Center for

Early Childhood Education, I realized that setting up the room in a positive way can

affect the children and how they learn. The classroom must be inviting and allow the

children opportunity to explore and learn. Certain materials in the classroom can
influence a child and what they learn. This was something that was a realization for me

during this experience to help me grow as an educator.

The Fishback Center for Early Childhood Education program through South

Dakota State University has provided me with many opportunities to be around young

children in an educational setting. This community service has also provided me with

many opportunities to grow as an educator and improve my skills. Truly it has showed

me where I want to be and how to continue to grow.