NHS - Middle School Homework Help Club

Today, February 11th 2014, I helped out for the first time with the middle school homework help club. NHS has been trying to organise tutoring for a while now, but we have decided to assist Mrs Mahaffy with this club every Tuesday after school instead. We're investigating doing this on Thursday as well, but the teacher who organises it hasn't responded to our request quite yet. I'm planning to do this every other tuesday after school.

Straight after classes I headed over to Mrs Mahaffy's room in the middle school. Today there were around 6 or 7 children at the club, which is not too much - Mrs Mahaffy told us that there are usually around 11! This group of kids are all in learning support, which means that they have some difficulty concentrating, etc. They were all sixth graders, so what they were doing was pretty simple. Most kids were focused on english and science homework. English revolved around the novel 'The Golden Goblet', and I found this quite funny due to the fact that I actually remember studying this book when I was in middle school. Furthermore, the studying that the kids were doing for science was about plant and animal cells, something that I studied at the beginning of this year. I was really relieved that I was comfortable with what they were doing, as I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to sufficiently help the kids.

I was assigned to help a boy named Tisae. He was really friendly and we spoke a bit at the start about where we were from, etc. We started out reading a chapter of 'The Golden Goblet'. I read out loud to him and he ate a snack and listened. Afterwards, we had to do an illustration assignment he had for Enlgish - he was required to design a cover of the chapter by drawing an important scene and including a quotation from the novel. This took quite a while, but we finally got it done. The picture was of the main character when he decides to block up the entrance to the tomb to trap the thieves. Tisae had a bit of trouble drawing and writing clearly, but I think that he did a really good job. He carefully went over all of his lines with black pen, and colored his picture with extreme concentration. After this was done I helped him to study science for a while. It was really useful having learned this information in HL biology, and I tried to make connections to real life situations. He had to learn the parts of an animal and plant cell, and he struggled in remembering the cytoplasm and the chloroplasts. I tried to explain it as simply as possible for him and come up with tricks to remember the words, and I hope that by the end of the session he had a greater understanding of the content.

I think that this session was really fun. I was originally intimidated and a little scared at the prospect of helping these kids, but I now feel a lot more confident and comfortable in the environment. I hope that I can really make a difference for them and increase my leadership, confidence, public speaking, and other traits that I haven't had a chance to develop much before. I love how relaxed everything is, and I look forward to my next session!