Skyline Literacy Coalition Pleasant Valley ESOL Class

On Tuesday night me, Aiden, and Riley went to Pleasant Valley elementary school to participate in the Skyline Literacy Coalition's ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) program. The program is on Tues and Thursday night from 6PM until 7:30PM. It was provided in conjunction with the school mostly for parents of students at the school. Parents are taking either beginner or intermediate level English classes run by trained tutors from Skyline.

Our job was to be with the kids. As far as I could tell all of the kids spoke pretty good English. The evening was broken into basically three parts. At the beginning we helped the kids do homework (pre-school aged children drew/colored). Then there was a time where we did an active game (Simon Says this week). The last thirty minutes we read to the kids. Because this week was rich in volunteers the reading time was pretty much one on one. Aiden and Riley did the reading and I just watched and helped when they stumbled.

We read to a boy named Uriel. Uriel was a sweet and very touchy-feely Hispanic boy. He asked lots of question and wanted to make eye contact sometime to the point of pulling your face towards his. He wasn't terribly good at respecting "tradition boundaries" he would come up to you and just grab your leg or plop down on your lap without asking.

We also worked with Octavio and Handwen. Both of these kids were a handful; very ADD and not good listeners. Handwen wouldn't tell you his name, he insisted on being called "Subway." He was a big time jokester. According to Vanessa (the Skyline coordinator in charge of the evening) he is Kurdish. For a while in college I tried to collect the phrase "How many teeth do you have?" in as many languages as possible. So I tried to get Subway to tell me. He may have done it once but blurted it out so fast that I couldn't understand what he said. He spent the rest of the evening insisting he was Hispanic.

Both Aiden and Riley enjoyed the evening, so we're headed back on Tuesday night. Let me know if you're interested.