Aiming to give students a hands-on learning opportunity, Teaching and Training students will take a trip to Forbuss Elementary to provide real life experience by working with younger children.
“It’s a helpful opportunity for them and to show the [younger] kids what older kids are doing,” Teaching and Training teacher Laura Penrod said. “This gives students the opportunity to share literacy with young people and to be able to have an experience helping [little kids] versus always working with people that are their same age.”
The idea of the trip was pitched in the fall, but it took some time and connections to get the idea executed.
“One of my students has a parent who is a librarian, and she offered to connect us,” Penrod said. “That’s how I ended up choosing where we’re going. It was just easy to work with someone that was already willing to host us.”
With an opportunity to put their skills to the test, Teaching and Training II student Hannah Turney is ready for this new experience.
“I’m very excited to attend [because] we’ll actually be getting into classrooms, so that we can see how their classes function differently,” Turney said. “Since we’re doing this right after the end of program [exam], it’s kind of like a reward, because we’re actually able to go into a classroom and see how that stuff’s done and actually teach the students.”
The students will choose from an assortment of books to be read to the students.
“I asked our librarian, who was a previous elementary school librarian, to give me a list of books that students really liked when she was in the elementary school environment,” Penrod said. “All of those books are essentially [the] books that we will be taking with us. My hope is to at least donate like three to five books to their library.”
Penrod talks about if this trip is a success, it is likely that it may happen again in the years to come.
“I would hope that it’s something that could be kept every year so that they would be able to keep it so that students can experience it every year with different kids given that Nevada Reading Week is something that happens [annually].” Penrod said. “I can’t guarantee anything because everything comes through funding and whether we can or can’t do things.“
