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.