Teach 36 children with limited English to read

Penndco Master Literacy Program

What an incredibly delightful experience this year has been as the children along with their teachers has been immersed in so many different kinds of reading and reading related experiences. Educators call it scaffolding: we call it fun! 

This all-in-English immersion program has been an hourly journey to civilizations and times far from what we know, bringing us always back to an awareness of our shared humanity and stoking our curiousity and supporting our increasing literary skills to discover more about ourselves, each other and the world.

For our sessions, we didn’t all read the same book chosen by the teachers. We trusted our students to choose from the wonderful cache of donated books we have. Our last component of the year invited the members to choose their own book and, after reading it, adapt a representative scene into a play and give the script to the fellow classmates for a dramatic presentation.

When students are eager to choose their own reading material, you know they really care! It was fascinating to hear why one student chose Shiloh, a novel about a young boy who wanted to rescue a dog from its abusive owner while another youngster chose Kofi, a book which details the events of a young African prince who, along with his fellows, is rounded up by slave traders and marched through the forest to a boat which will take him irrevocably far from home with nothing to take with him except his memories and his pride.

The students quickly grasped the minutiae of transposing the scene they chose from their book into a scene to be acted out. Our class truly became a freindship club in which our shared love of books and discovery was our bond and our delight.

The sense of acccomplishment at years’s end is uplifting and garners for the students and their families the vision of successful academic futures. This program is both the emotional and cognitive basis for that future.

                       PENNDCO Literacy Master Map Program Spring 2016

The students in our Penndco Literacy Master Map Program are developing into confident readers and writers as a result of the way in which our educational objectives are implemented to foster comprehension and emotional growth through reading. Parents greet the teacher weekly with tentative smiles and ask to be assured that their child is doing well. Our students’ parents know that literacy matters even more than money is securing a bright productive future for their children.

Our donors’ commitment to literacy gave our students the opportunity to read Animal Farm, the 1945 classic by George Orwell. The students came to understand that this is not a simple fable, but a symbolic retelling of the tragic story of how totalitarianism corrupts, something that is very real to students whose parents came to this country from the former Soviet Union. Animal Farm dismisses the promise of violence as a way to find honor and repair social ills, a crucial lesson for our young people to affirm. The book was a natural opening to learning more about the history in their textbooks as well as the history of their families.

While wrestling with the themes of Animal Farm our students acquired 75 SAT level vocabulary items as well as an introduction to junior high school level sentence analysis and paragraph structure culminating in three-paragraph short essay production practice. In addition, the students analyzed the two film adaptations and presented their reasons as to which adaptation was most faithful to Orwell’s message.

Our next unit was an intensive grammar sentence analysis boot camp to strengthen students’ mechanics. Our students will not every confuse: their, there and they’re!

Our final unit of the year will give the students an opportunity to choose their own book and adapt a section as a play complete with stage notes. The implicit message of this unit is that literary skills are the most way to express the depth of imagination and the power of ideas.

Our weekly classes are thoughtful, productive and fun and continue to promote joyful, meaningful reading experiences at home as our Penndco Program supports the development of students whose verbal and written skills reinforce their emotional, social and academic growth.

On a personal note, the instructor is grateful for the trust of her students and their parents along with the devoted donors and supporters of the Penndco Literacy Master Map Program.