Mid service learning reflection

I am currently completing my service learning at Martin Luther King Elementary School working with children ranging from Kindergarten to 5th grade in an after school program. This program provides the children with a safe and comforting place to do their homework, hangout with their friends, and get a snack. Since I am just getting to know these children I do not know everything about them and their background, so I do not have a lot of examples that relate back to the class work we do. In class I feel as if a lot of the material we focus on relates back to the parents, home life, and how they have been raised thus far. I only see them once a week, so I cannot make judgments regarding their course of development and influences that have left impacts on their life. The two examples that I have noticed that we have covered in class include Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory and The Ecological Systems Theory. I have noticed elements of the Sociocultural Theory in the children’s dialogue. Considering their age the children have a very advanced dialogue with rather colorful language. Personally, I was not even familiar with some of these words that Kindergarteners and 1st graders are expressing. I think this has to do with the culture they were raised and possibly the community. I think that the Kindergarteners at the school pick up on language that is used by the older kids and then they start to say it. Although teachers and administrators try their best to stop the kids from using bad language and reprimanding them when they do I feel as if the colorful language they have come to know is forever imbedded in their brain. I think the Ecological Systems Theory plays a big role in understanding these children and the school I am working at. For me it was rather different to go into a school like this in a bad neighborhood and see children behaving in ways that I had never seen before. However, for the teachers that work there are so used to it they don’t even