From: Annie McDevitt
Submit: Post Field Note
VisitDate: 11/15/96
Adult-Run:
Children-Run:
Collaborative: Selected
Unclear-Philosophy:
Bottom-up:
Top-down: Selected
Unclear-Approach:
Informal: Selected
Formal:
Unclear-Type:
LearningArea:
Date: 18 Nov 1996
Time: 17:01:59
Remote Name: octal-lab-mac02.ucsc.edu
Filogonio, Male, Age 10
On Friday at Barrios Unidos, I played with Filogonio. It seems like every time he comes, he plays the same game or with the same program, The Lion King. I don't know if maybe it would be better if he switched around and tried different games. Anyway, he started to play the game where you have to use the mouse to turn a card over. The card has a picture of one of the characters from the Lion King and you try to find its match. So we started to play it together. Filogonio would beat me everytime. Maybe I wasn't trying hard enough, but he seemed to have a reallly good memory. He would get really excited and start saying things like "Voy a ganar,voy a ganar". So I would joke with him and tell him he was cheating. Then Mercedes played the game with him and she won. Then he didn't seem to enjoy it as much. Maybe he only liked to play it if he was winning.
I think Filogonio and I were experiencing collaborative learning because we were taking turns and competing against one another. I think the game was top down because it was teaching memorization skills without drilling. Filogonio saw the point of the game as winning or finding as many matches as possible. I don't think he was aware that he was improving his memorization. It was an informal experience because we were using a game to learn. My time with Filogonio made me wonder if kids have better short term memories than adults. But Mercedes seemed to do better than him, so maybe it's an individual thing. As well I wonder if kids are usually more motivated to stick with something when they appear to be doing well, or better than other kids. If that's true, then that could have a very negative impact on kids who speak english as a second. They might get very discouraged after always seeing other kids do better than them.
I think I chose to work with Filogonio because I really like working with kids who are primarily spanish speaking. It's a challenge to me and I enjoy exploring how they learn and ways to teach so that the language difference isn't a barrier.