Essay After School Programs...

The purpose of this paper is to describe three psychosocial theories and how they impacted my own personal development. I will use the theories to trace my development throughout my undergraduate career and show how I processed information and how is some situations I am still developing. In this paper, I will use Marcia’s theory identity development to describe how I moved from moratorium to identity achievement. I will also use Chickering’s vector developing a mature interpersonal relationship to discuss how I am continually developing. I will conclude with discussion two components of Bronfenbrenner’s developmental ecology theory.

Culture, ethnicity, family, sexuality, and society are all factors that can influence a person’s identity. A combination of all these elements usually result in the successful discovery of self-identity. Preadolescents and adolescents often find themselves in a constant battle attempting to find who they are or who they want to be. Adolescents are faced with questions like, What do you want to be when you grow up? What colleges are you looking into? What are your plans after high school?. In a normal process of growth, teens experiment with new activities in order to find their identity, but this is not the case for every teen. Some adolescents do not go through the normal process of experimentation for various reasons.

Education is important for our future. From the time children reach pre-kindergarten age to even adulthood, they are constantly learning new things. Without education, we would only learn through exploration. Exploration is wonderful, but having a structured setting and learning a variety of topics helps us to become well rounded individuals. In today’s school systems, children come from all walks of life. Some have very involved parents, some come from poverty, some come from wealthy families, and some come from families that speak a foreign language at home. With some students, stability at home is an issue. These students may face challenges in school that make it hard for them to excel like other students. Many schools offer programs for all students, based on their needs. These programs strive for motivation and success, they explore each child’s learning style, and they strive for diversity. Programs offered by the school are a wonderful way to help those students who may not receive what they need at home and they also help students who may have stability at home, but need a boost in other areas. Ultimately, there’s a program for every student, no matter what their situation is.

Montgomery County After School Program caters to children ages 5-11 years of age. The Mid County Center After School Program receives children from Bel Pre and Strathmore Elementary Schools. Both schools are considered Title I, which means that the school has a majority of children from low-income families. The school provides free breakfast and lunch to all students. Bel Pre and Strathmore Elementary School receive funding from Elementary and Secondary Education Act to assist the schools in meeting the state standards for Academics. As a part of that, it means ensuring that hunger and family income pose as little barrier as possible to receiving a quality education.

In the article Link of Adolescent’s Identity Development and Relationship with Peers by Tija Ragelienė, the author discussed the correlation that positive relationships with friends have on an adolescent’s identity development. The article starts out by explaining how exploring different identities is important for adolescents. Adolescents need to explore and construct their identity in order to find their place in society. One theorist believes that identity is more or less represented through self-realizing activities where they feel like they are worth something. However, according to another theorist, Berzonsky, identity is actually how a person processes “and examines identity relevant information” (Ragelienė 98). Another definition

Illiteracy has been a reoccurring predicament ever since people have been able to read. Either children do not understand how to read and write in school, or they require extra help in becoming skilled in the areas of reading and writing. After school programs were created to help schools increase the literacy development in children. An after school program is defined as a program that offers its services to children after school to help them with arts, crafts, sports, or homework. Are after school programs fulfilling their duty to increase the level of literacy in children? After school programs are increasing the level of literacy in children kindergarten through sixth grade because they were created to help children increase

Personal identity formation is one of the main foundations of youth development, which is crucial to understand youth while working with them in the MODEL program. Adolescents generally depend on various social-psychological styles to figure out their own identity style (Crocetti, Erentaite, & Zukauskiene, 2014). Youth rely on these different styles to pursue growth and refine themselves, encrypting their own relevant data (Crocetti, Erentaite, & Zukauskiene, 2014). The identity styles can be “information-oriented, normative, and diffuse-avoidant” (Crocetti, Erentaite, & Zukauskiene, 2014, p. 1818). It will depend on how youth adjust to the various identity styles to impact the active contribution to their societies (Crocetti, Erentaite, & Zukauskiene, 2014). These identity styles reflect on positive youth development based on the “Five C’s Model, which include Competence, Confidence, Character, Connection, and Caring” (Crocetti, Erentaite, & Zukauskiene, 2014). Information-oriented identity style individuals are personally thoughtful and efficiently discover and assess self-significant data (Berzonsky, 2011). Individuals with a normative identity style naturally embrace regulations and beliefs from significant others and automatically adapt to their desires (Berzonsky, 2011). Last but not least, adolescents with a diffuse-avoidant identity style dawdle and defer managing personality issues for as long as they can (Berzonsky, 2011). The

By allowing children, a choice to decide their activities and playing partners we are teaching them the strategies to build relationships not only in child care settings, but in a society later in their lives.Furthermore, they also learn if they can or cannot use familiar materials in different ways, For example, in our in class workshop we randomly selected straws and connectors and animal characters. We had a choice to select anything.(intrinsic motivation) This opportunity made us to think what kind of materials we wanted to play with, without any adult interfering (exploration) not only we were motivated as we wanted to make something, but once we gathered our material we were engaged in a discussion about how to make a building out of it.(social interaction) Everyone in our group were proposing different ideas, but finally we decided to make a zoo.(intellectual development). During play a conflict arose between two players regarding sharing the straws and they

Most parents and teachers are aware that students who keep busy with school work and extra-curricular activities are less likely to get into serious trouble. They are also generally aware of the benefits of physical and skill development that take place when a child plays soccer, learns to play the violin, or participates in a drama club. For the most part, awareness of these benefits is common sense, but the effects of these activities can have much deeper and long lasting social and emotional benefits than people may be aware of. Particularly for students whose home life may not afford or provide opportunity to be involved in sports or clubs, schools need to be prepared to offer these “essential” extra-curricular opportunities. By the same philosophy whereby breakfast and meal programs are appearing in schools across the country, school boards need to invest in children by supporting them after school as well. This support is not meant to become a further childcare service, but one that is focused on positive youth development.

Afterschool programs can play a crucial role in a student’s success both in and out of the classroom. Since a large majority of low-income students go to homes which are not supervised, afterschool programs are viewed as an effective way of keeping these students out of trouble after school hours. It is for this reason why afterschool programs do play a significant role in

After-school programs have a history of providing a positive effect on the next generation of youths. Some programs will face numerous concerns from parents and the communities that host the programs. Along with the financial obligations in order to run the program, amount of caregivers that are required to make the programs a positive environment and the over-all assurance of the patents can become overwhelming. Designed Afterschool programs will provide young people numerous services, that will support the needs required to improve academic performance, learn leadership skills, develop conflict resolution and mediation skills. Many programs also offer sports, arts, and cultural activities (Alliannce). With the skills that

After school programs were initially created to give disadvantage youth a place to go after school (Halpern, 2002). The primary objective of these

adolescents going through a journey of social and emotional change to discover who they are and

During this quarter, I have volunteered in Chinese Information and Service Center (CISC) in Chinatown. It is a community-based organization that helps Asians and other immigrants throughout King County succeed their new life in this foreign country with an unfamiliar culture and language. The after-school program I worked with is one of the programs offered in CISC that aims for children from grade 1 to 8 who are from low-income families, recent immigrants or limited language abilities to enrich and empower them socially, culturally, and academically. More specifically, we help children practicing social skills, academic knowledge and language usage during play time, homework hour, diverse daily activity and reading hour. All we do is

Two-thirds of children who participate in extracurricular activities are expected to attain at least a bachelor’s degree, whereas only half of children that do not participate do (National Center for Education Statistics, 1995). Childhood is a very important time in our lives, a time when we develop many vital skills that follow us into adulthood. Some people laugh or scoff at us parents that keep our children to busy schedules. Those same people would also argue that our children should be allowed to have a childhood, to not be so tightly scheduled in their daily lives. Before jumping on that bandwagon, I would suggest doing a little research. Participating in after-school activities has shown to benefit children in many ways. Children should participate in after school activities because they help build confidence, teach teamwork, encourage creativity, and promote physical activity.