I just wish I had started volunteering sooner!

This post was written for the July 2013 Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival hosted by Stephen at Head of the Heard; this month's theme is "Hidden Opportunities."  Do go read about other parents' discoveries and surprises on their journey to bilingualism!

In July 2005, my husband Ed and I got married.  I was working as a lecturer in French at Colorado State University, an hour's drive away from my new home in Lafayette, Colo.  With all my co-workers, my book groups, my favorite theatre and restaurants, and so many friends back there, I was concerned that Lafayette would be where I slept but Fort Collins where I lived.

Therefore, in August 2005, when I heard that the local library was looking for volunteer tutors for its drop-in afterschool Homework Center, I applied, thinking that helping out there would help me meet people, practice my Spanish, and maybe even make math and reading more manageable for some of the kids.  Who knew that this volunteer gig would lead to more opportunities for me to pursue my ultimate career goal of teaching French to young children?

Here's how it gradually happened...

2005: At the Homework Center, I worked with a lot of children who were emergent or struggling readers.  I also befriended Estela, the Homework Center Assistant.

Denver Channel 7 News featured the Homework Center as one of its Everyday Heroes (you can catch a glimpse of me and Griffin at the very end of the clip)

2006: Estela was promoted to Reading Buddies Coordinator at the library.  I kept tutoring and, overall, learning more from the kids than they probably were learning from me!  

fall 2006: My supervisor at the Homework Center recommended me to a parent who was looking for a private reading tutor for her child.  I started tutoring this second-grade girl twice a week.  (Also, my nephew was born, and soon after that, this blog about speaking exclusively French to him!)

a happy Tatie and her baby nephew

2007: Realizing that I didn't know enough about how to help a student who was reading so far below grade level, I started actively researching strategies, activities, materials, and methods.  (Developing these lessons got me all fired up about teaching children to read--too bad my nephew was still a toddler.)

For example, modifying board games like Candyland by writing word families on each square so that the players have to say a word that ends with that particular letter combination--great for emergent readers!

spring 2007: The commute back and forth to CSU--especially during snowstorms--was dragging me down and I was losing my enthusiasm for teaching college students.  My husband and I had also been trying to start a family.

summer 2007: Estela's husband got a new job and they had to leave Lafayette.  She suggested that I apply for her part-time position as coordinator of Reading Buddies, a free reading enrichment program in which middle and high school volunteers meet once a week one-on-one with younger students to read together and play literacy games.  And I was pregnant!

fall 2007: I resigned from CSU.  During my Reading Buddies interview, I answered their questions about working with reluctant readers with lots of specific ideas, most of which had developed from my private tutoring and my Homework Center experience.  Volunteering pays off--I got the job!

fall 2007: It dawned on me that many parallels exist between my old job (helping college students learn to read and write in their second language) and my new one (helping teenagers help elementary school students learn to read and write in their first language).  Very cool.

2008: My son, Griffin, was born, and I began speaking to him exclusively in French.

happy Maman and her baby boy

newborn Griffin visits a Reading Buddies session and hears his first Eric Carle book

Little Buddies reading to the "Baby Buddy" while the Big Buddy wonders why exactly his supervisor brought a screaming child to work

2009: Griffin and I joined a French-language playgroup.

2010: Several of us from the playgroup attended a French storytime at a different library and were so disappointed that we decided to create our own storytime!  And since I was already employed at a library, it wasn't hard to get this approved.  (So now I had three different "jobs" there, two volunteer and one paid.)

my friend Mathilde and her two boys at French storytime

2011: I developed more confidence in planning and leading storytimes in my second language, even in front of an audience of native speakers, even while chasing my active preschooler around the room, even during18 weeks of morning sickness while pregnant with my daughter!  (Then I took a little break after she was born.)

pensive baby Gwyneth, two days old, wearing the dress that I sported when my parents brought me home from the hospital

And here she is at her first Reading Buddies session, age 1, watching the big kids play Chutes and Ladders with word families

2012: When local nonprofits solicited donations for their silent auction fundraisers, I offered French lessons for children.

I had already developed some games--but they would be more fun to play with kids than by myself

2013: For the first time, an auction winner actually followed up and brought her children to me for French classes!

spring 2013: A violin teacher overhears me talking about storytime and asks me to lead the French immersion lesson each day in her French-themed summer Suzuki strings camp.

the students' performance of "Roule Galette" on the last day of class; Griffin is the boy in the blue shirt

summer 2013: And it actually happened!  For the first time, I received real money to teach a French class to children, with my bilingual son as my teaching assistant (and my toddler daughter doing all the not-sitting-still this time).

So, you see, after eight years of volunteer work (and countless hugs and "thank yous" from the Homework Center students), I have a job I love which makes me feel connected to the community and which has enabled me to develop and practice the skills which I will need to continue teaching French classes for children (and to motivate me to keep using French with my own kids)!  

some of my Reading Buddies

more Reading Buddies

But first, I'm going to catch up on my sleep.  That crazy koala bear toddler still isn't sleeping through the night.

but we love her anyway

Krashen and the Kid

When I was working on my MA in Teaching English as a Second Language at CSU, one of my professors talked about Stephen Krashen. All. The. Time. And for good reason—he changed the way we looked at language teaching, helping the field move from the model of “Here’s a paragraph. Now translate it” to trying to recreate in the classroom how we learn our first language (lots of passive intake before we can make coherent sentences on our own). (Read an overview of his major theories here.)

My professor, Doug Flahive, who boasted of being on a first-name basis with Krashen, liked to tell us about how this language researcher guru started out as an award-winning weight-lifter and how he would wear tank tops even on airplanes. Thus I have always had this unusual image in my mind of a brilliant man testing the Monitor Hypothesis and conducting research on comprehensible input from the weight room. Ten years later, I finally get to meet him (and he’s dressed respectably)!

Krashen has always championed reading as the best way to learn one’s second language, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him at a library conference (Colorado Association of Libraries). During his keynote speech, he shared with the CAL attendees summaries of some current research about the benefits of free voluntary reading, both in English (first language) classes and ESL/EFL classes. In a nutshell, according to him, reading is the very best thing we can encourage students to do. Specifically, reading good old-fashioned books from public, school, classroom, and home libraries, as opposed to fancy computerized reading games for kids.

Krashen also took some time to excoriate standardized testing, pointing out that we could get nearly identical results for much less money by testing very small sample groups every couple of years (it would be considered public service for the students, much like jury duty), which would then allow us to spend huge amounts of money on books instead of testing. He also debunked eight or ten spurious studies and articles claiming that activities like playing chess and reading to birds can improve students’ reading.

From his talk, two studies stand out most in my mind. In one, a group of adult Korean women learning English were given Sweet Valley High books to read to fun. (Anyone else remember those? Elizabeth was the nice, bookish one, which her twin Jessica was the feisty troublemaker? Yes, I’ll admit I read those in 6th grade.) The series was too hard for the students, so the teacher tried them on the Sweet Valley Twins series for 4th graders, then the Sweet Valley Kids series for 2nd graders (where, presumably, Elizabeth spends her time coloring inside the lines while Jessica jumps in mud puddles). The Korean women loved the books, read through the easiest series, then the middle one, and by a year later were reading the ones at the 6th grade level with ease. Their English grammar and vocabulary had improved immensely—and they hadn’t been taking English classes during this period. Wow!

Krashen and other researchers have also looked at whether the number of books a child has access to at home is a predictor in how well they will do in school, and indeed, it is, a strong one. He cited a study which found the average number of books for children and teens in the an average Beverly Hills home—250—and also the average number in the nearby inner city—point five. As in, one book in every two houses. Wow. Yikes.

After he concluded his speech, I went up to him and introduced myself. Here’s how it went:

Sarah: I’m a former student of Doug Flahive and am so thrilled to meet you after having studied your research! Now I’m the coordinator of a Reading Buddies program, which we think is very successful, but every time I apply for funding, the grantors want quantitative proof that Reading Buddies works, and I don’t have the means to conduct studies to document that.

Krashen: You don’t have to! Let me do that for you. That’s what I do. I do the research so that people like you can run Reading Buddies. I can’t run a Reading Buddies program, but I can tell other people why it’s a good thing. Here’s what you need to do: read my book (The Power of Reading), sign up for my newsletter [on his website], and get my Twitter feed.

Sarah: Okey-dokey. I’m not on Twitter, though.

Krashen: You need to be. I share important stuff, not what I had for breakfast.

Sarah: Okay.

Krashen: You go run Reading Buddies, and let me do the research for you, kid.

Sarah, to herself: Did this long-admired scholar just call me “kid”?!

So I went home and now I’m getting started on doing everything he told me to! There’s hope for Reading Buddies if Dr. Stephen Krashen, 1977 bench-press champion of Venice Beach, California, is rooting for us, right?!

sad songs, a big basement, and a challenging conference

I'm back from CALCON and ready to write! I've been absent from this blog for a couple of weeks because of Two Very Big Projects and One Smaller But Still Time-Consuming Task:

1. Researching and writing the next installment in my series for Multilingual Living, "Learning French In and Around the Maison," which, as it focuses on music, sent me scrambling to Griffin's CD collection, YouTube, and the vast expanses of the Internet to find songs about homes and houses. I discovered a surprising number of children's songs and nursery rhymes about appalling situations in one's home: bugs, rodents, fire, famine, and willful destruction of property. Stay tuned--the article should be published on Tuesday, barring any natural disasters.

2. Emptying out our 900-square-foot basement so that our contractor and his workers can transform one large, cold, concrete room used previously only for storage and ping-pong into a space that will--in December!--house a guest room, my home office, a bathroom, and a space that I can use for French classes for kids one day.

And if we can figure out the logistics, we'll have bookcases that slide to the side between my office and the playroom area, which will really open it up for those French classes (and make it very easy to, say, grab my stuffed Eiffel Tower and books and French games from my office when I want to show them to the kiddos).

3. Planning a three-hour workshop about Reading Buddies to present at the Colorado Association of Libraries conference. I called it "The Complete Works of Reading Buddies, Abridged: How to Create (or Expand!) a Reading Buddies Program at Your Library or School," and my goal was to give the attendees lots of ideas plus the materials they would need to start up their own program.

This involved a suitcase full of props, a briefcase full of handouts, my very first PowerPoint presentation created all by myself (I've been very resistant to that program so far), and five teen Reading Buddy volunteers for the panel discussion. Whew. After getting all that ready, I was pooped.

(Curious? You can access some of my handouts and materials online.)

What was really exciting about the CAL Conference, though, turned out to be meeting the keynote speaker afterwards: Dr. Stephen Krashen, a language-teaching researcher whose work I studied throughout grad school! I'll write about what exactly he was doing at a librarians' conference, what we talked about, and what he called me in my next post.

Oh, all right. I won't leave you hanging on the edge of your seat (who knows when I'll make time to write here again): he called me "kid." Kid! This language guru called me "kid"! And me 36 years old this year. Sheesh!

writing better with Writing Buddies

What do you get when you cross four talented, enthusiastic young adults with 15 fourth and fifth graders who need practice writing and have them meet once a week for six weeks? My brand-new Writing Buddies program!

As some of you may know, I work part-time coordinating reading enrichment programs at the public library. In Reading Buddies, middle and high school volunteers are trained and then paired one-on-one with a younger child to read together and play literacy games in order to give the kids practice reading with a caring teen mentor in a fun, non-judgmental environment. They meet together once a week for two or three months, and thus a significant rapport can develop between the Little Buddies and their Big Buddies.

This summer, however, an elementary school with which we have partnered asked me to provide Big Buddies for their summer school program for first through fifth graders, and I knew that our traditional model of one Big Buddy per one Little Buddy wouldn't work--there wouldn't be enough volunteers available to assign one to each child in each grade. Plus, making a fourth or fifth grader read with a student who was only a couple of years older could feel like a punishment, like these kids were being singled out to prove that they're not very good readers.

Instead, we piloted a Writing Buddies program. Four experienced Big Buddies (aged 14 and above) worked in small groups with two classes. They met with me beforehand to plan out the lessons, and they were the ones in charge of carrying them out while I watched from the side. (This is a good exercise in not-being-a-control-freak for me!)

Here's what we did:

• Chose a theme (outer space exploration) that would connect all the reading and writing.
• Planned different types of writing assignments, most of which would help them practice skills they would need for writing in school.
• Created worksheets with brainstorming activities, graphic organizers, and writing prompts.
• Selected books to use for a short storytime at the beginning of each class to help the kids transition to our literacy class and start thinking about our theme.

The writing skills we focused (and the writing prompts we gave them) on were:

• Description: You are an astronaut who has been traveling for years and you just landed on a brand-new planet. Describe what it looks like.
• Procedural: Follow the directions to build a spaceship out of carrots, celery, peanut butter, and bread, and then describe in your own words what you did. (Click on the link, scroll down to The Jigaree, and select "Spaceship Snack")
• Persuasion: Convince the inhabitants of this planet why you deserve to stay there.
• Poetry: Exercise your creativity to write one or more of the following types of poems using the outer space theme: an acrostic poem, a shape poem, a haiku.
• Revision: Choose one piece and edit it for inclusion in the booklet we send home on the last day. (The kids each read one of their writings aloud.)
• Vocabulary Building: Do a Mad Lib written by the Big Buddies about traveling in outer space. (We had this one on hand for kids who finished the revision early.)

The most frustrating part was the inconsistency of the students' attendance; very few actually attended all the classes, and some joined after the first or second week, thus missing out on our attempts to set the stage for the rest. However, it worked well enough that I'm eager to start offering Writing Buddies at the library to serve the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students who are too old to be Little Buddies but too young to be Big Buddies in our reading programs.

I would love to hear about other similar programs that you might know about or learn more strategies of how to get kids to write and how to empower teen volunteers!

Email me at babybilingual (at) gmail (dot) com if you would like copies of the materials--I'm happy to share!

This post was written for inclusion in the Teach/Learn Blogging Carnival sponsored by Deb at Science@Home; the category for this month's carnival is "English." Click here to see the other authors' inspiring ideas for promoting literacy in your home or classroom!

Griffin's first television appearance!

Well, he appears briefly at the very end of this news segment featuring the tutors of the library's Homework Center, where I've volunteered for five years. We won an "Everyday Heroes" award from a Denver television station (The Denver Channel), and Griffin and I were there when the anchorman and the cameras showed up. This clip provides a really clear overview of what we offer (for free!) at the Homework Center.

Raise money for Reading Buddies (and get cheap kids' stuff too)!

Fellow Boulder/Denver families...

Make money for your family and for the Reading Buddies of Lafayette Public Library by signing up to consign your used kids' clothes/toys/books/gear and maternity clothes at the upcoming Shop Kids Event consignment sale at the Lafayette Rec Center, March 26-28. If you say you're a friend of Reading Buddies when you sign up, the organizer will donate your consignment fee directly to us. And if you bring a copy of the Reading Buddies flyer when you shop, we'll receive 5% of your total purchase price. (Email me at babybilingual at gmail dot com and I'll send you the flyer.)

Also cool: the organizer will donate any unsold, un-picked-up books and art supplies to Reading Buddies!

Reading Buddies, by the way, is the award-winning reading enrichment program that I coordinate at the Lafayette Public Library. Last year 250+ students participated in one (or more) of eleven different semester-long sessions, including 100+ teen mentors who volunteered their time. Not bad considering that we're not part of the city budget and we have to depend on grants, fundraising, and donations to stay alive!

Don't do this! (not that any of you would)

In my Reading Buddies program at the library, there's a 9th grade girl who has been a volunteer for several years. She has a Latino last name and parents with Spanish accents, so on occasion I have asked her if she'd like to help a child from a Spanish-speaking home practice reading en espanol. Each time she shakes her head and reminds me that she herself doesn't speak Spanish.

A couple of weeks ago, a mom who doesn't speak English wanted to sign her son up for the spring session of our reading enrichment program, but I hadn't updated and printed the Spanish applications at that point. I was using my best librarian Spanish to try to tell her that I would mail her the Spanish info in a week or two (a la "Me Talk Pretty One Day," probably saying something along the lines of "I you letter the solicitation in one weeks and you me it give in desk in bookstore to put the boy in the program"), when the above-mentioned student shyly joined us, picked up the English application, and translated each question for the mom and helped her write her responses.

Afterwards, I thanked her profusely, and then asked why she had always denied her bilingualism. Here's what she said:

"My mom always makes fun of me when I speak Spanish. So I don't."

a Very Big Check

Good news for the reading enrichment program that I coordinate at the library: we won the $1000 grant we had applied for this summer! Because so many of you nominated us, we had a very strong chance of winning the drawing. We really appreciate your support: in this predominantly grant-funded program with an annual budget of $12,000, $1000 makes a big impact, extending our funding into 2009 and helping us help more kids get excited about books. Thanks to everyone who voted.

Here we are with the Very Big Check:

Vote!

As many of you know, I coordinate a reading enrichment program at Lafayette Public Library. This free, award-winning program is primarily grant-funded—and our grant has just run out! Help us raise more money by entering us in Boulder, Colorado's Precision Plumbing Company’s $1000 monthly drawing for non-profits. Just go to their website and fill out a form with your contact info to nominate the Lafayette Public Library Reading Buddies.

We need as many entries as possible by the end of July, but they limit it to one per person, so please ask your family, friends, correspondants, and colleagues too. Even if you don't live around here, you can still nominate us for this generous grant. Let’s keep this valuable program alive! This summer's 130 Reading Buddies and I thank you very much.

I can read to babies!

Look what I've learned about reading to children since starting my job at the library! (A big shout-out to Betsy Stroomer, head of the Children's department at Lafayette Public Library, who spoke at the Survival for New Moms group at the hospital and who leads the baby storytime at the library--thanks for sharing so many books and rhymes and ideas with us.)

While there's no wrong way to read a book to a child, a few tricks will help your baby get more out of the book, regardless of which language you use.

First, choose a book that's appropriate for infants. A lot of popular children's picture books have been republished as board books, but just because the pages are sturdy doesn't mean that the story will resonate with babies! In fact, babies prefer very simple books with big pictures and few words on a page--they can't follow the plot of a story and don't appreciate complex illustrations.

Rather, choose books that will allow you to use each page as a springboard for sharing words and ideas with children. Describe the picture, tell them what it reminds you of, connect it to their lives. Ask them questions based on the picture. Count the number of objects in each picture. Sing songs and recite nursery rhymes that are related to the content of the book.

Among your read-aloud collection, include books that rhyme to turn children on to the sounds of the language and to help train their brains to recognize patterns. Encourage kids to play with words!

All the while, make your voice and face as expressive as possible--babies respond more to animated reading than to calm or expressionless reading. And read the same book many, many times. You'll get tired of it, but your baby won't.

Yes, an infant won't really understand what you're saying, whether you're slowly and clearly counting the ducks on a page or reading a moralistic fairy tale. But that baby will stare at the picture, will gaze at your mouth, will make sounds in reply. That baby will gradually understand that books have words which represent concepts, that those words have accompanying sounds, that books are read from front to back and left to right (or whatever the case may be in your language), that you turn their pages, and much more--all of which prepares that baby to learn to read down the road. Moreover, that baby is learning tons of words in context from your commentary.

I'm discovering that I can spend ten or fifteen minutes reading an eight-page board book with one word per page to Griffin. As an example of my recommendations above, here's what I might do with the following page of the charming I Can by Helen Oxenbury:

Tu vois le bébé? Le bébé peut courir. Maman peut courir. Oui, je peux courir. Mais toi, mon fils, tu ne peux pas courir. Non, tu ne peux pas encore courir. Parce que tu ne peux pas encore marcher! Papa peut courir, et ton cousin peut courir. Ils courent. Ils courent vite! Ils aiment courir. Moi, je n'aime pas courir. Mais un jour, toi et moi, on va courir ensemble. Oui, nous allons courir ensemble dans le jardin et dans le parc et à la montagne.

Griffin, tu connais le furet? Le furet qui court? Tu connais la chanson du furet? Tu veux que je chante la chanson du furet qui court? "Il court, il court, le furet, le furet du Bois Mesdames, il court, il court, le furet, le furet du Bois Joli, il est passé par ici…"

Que porte le bébé qui court? Qu'est-ce qu'il porte? Il porte une salopette rouge, un t-shirt rouge et blanc, et des chaussures blanches. Il vaut mieux porter des chaussures quand on court, sinon on peut se faire du mal. Toi, Griffin, tu ne portes pas souvent de chaussures, parce que tu es trop petit pour marcher. Tu ne marches pas, tu ne cours pas. Mais tu portes des salopettes comme ce bébé. Tu es trop mignon dans tes salopettes! Tu en as en bleu et en beige. Tu as même une salopette avec un lapin sur la poche!

Qu'est-ce que tu portes aujourd'hui, Griffin? Tu portes un body jaune avec Winnie l'Ourson. Tu ne portes pas de salopette. Tu ne portes pas de chaussures. Qu'est-ce que Maman porte? Maman ne porte pas de salopette non plus. Maman ne porte pas de chaussures. Maman porte une robe violette.

No, it's not Shakespeare. It might bore you silly. But it's what your baby needs.

(The English translation of my monologue is located beneath the Griffin in Overalls photo spread. Yes, any excuse to post pictures of my beautiful baby!)

All right, enough oohing and ahhing. Time for the translation: Do you see the baby? The baby can run. Mommy can run. Yes, I can run. But you, my son, you can't run. No, you can't run yet. Because you can't walk yet! Daddy can run, and your cousin can run. They run. They run fast! They like to run. Me, I don't like to run. But one day, you and me, we'll run together. Yes, we'll go running together in the yard and in the park and in the mountains.

Griffin, do you know the ferret? The ferret that runs? You know the song about the running ferret? Do you want me to sing the ferret song? "He runs, he runs, the ferret, the ferret of the Ladies' Forest, he runs, he runs, the ferret, the ferret of the Pretty Woods, he ran past here…"

What is the baby who runs wearing? What is he wearing? He's wearing red overalls, a red and white t-shirt, and white shoes. It's a good idea to wear shoes when you run, or else you could hurt yourself. You don't wear shoes very often, Griffin, because you're too little to walk. You don't walk, you don't run. But you wear overalls like this baby. You are too cute in your overalls! You have some blue ones and some beige ones. You even have a pair of overalls with a bunny on the pocket!

What are you wearing today, Griffin? You're wearing a yellow onesie with Winnie-the-Pooh on it. You're not wearing overalls. You're not wearing shoes. What is Mommy wearing? Mommy's not wearing overalls either. Mommy's not wearing shoes. Mommy's wearing a purple dress.

P.S.: Read my friend Estela's articles for more ideas on sharing books with babies and how to choose good books for them.

dancing with español; or, sleep-deprived ramblings of a would-be trilingual

Estela, Cynde, and Katie, you'd be so proud of me: I'm taking a "Spanish for Librarians" class! I want to be able to communicate with the Hispanophone parents of my Reading Buddies without having to resort to tortuous circumlocution. Class started today--and it just felt so good to be taking a concrete step to learn how to communicate for real (not just conjugate) in another language. Seeing how much I could understand from the teacher's rapid-fire all-Spanish directions and explanations turned out to be fun--a welcome change from the challenge of understanding Griffin's all-baby coos and cries. (Unfortunately, he doesn't come with a bilingual infant-parent dictionary.)

Oh, that's one of the new words I learned today! Unfortunately. "Desafortunadamente." What a mouthful! It's so long you regret deciding to tackle it once you get to the middle, but unfortunately, you must continue to the end. "Desafortunadamente." It sounds like a dance--the Macarena, but morose.

But I digress. The teacher kindly told me that my vocabulary and grammar were great considering how little Spanish I've formally studied, but that I sound like a French person when I speak Spanish. Yet isn't that preferable to sounding like an American?! At least they're both Romance languages. (Yay for cognates!)

Don't ask me how I have time for this with a baby around plus my library job plus my tutoring. (I don't. My blog is suffering from neglect! Sorry. And it's been a while since I read my favorite blogs--but I promise I'll drop by soon, Jeanne et al.!)

Oh, and I have a new tutoring client in French: an adult who hopes to study in France eventually. She wants to work primarily on conversation. I can't wait! I think we'll use newspaper articles and websites as a springboard for discussion and to explore French culture.

Okay, I'll admit it: while I love my job at the library, I do miss teaching French (and speaking it to people who don't drool copiously and holler incoherently in my ear). Griffin's adorable, but it's hard to hold a meaningful conversation with him.

Here's Griffin doing the Desafortunadamente dance. See? I told you he was adorable!

All righty, enough of this. It's late and I'm getting loopy. I must go to bed. Desafortunadamente.

ce que Griffin aime (what Griffin loves)

la Tour Eiffel:

Papa:

Tonton Matt:

et les livres!

(Here Griffin and Papa are visiting me at work at the Reading Buddies program at the Lafayette Public Library. The kids were falling all over each other to read books to him!)

getting ready for Reading Buddies

Just in case any of my readers are in the Lafayette, CO area and have kids in grades 1-3 or 6-12--and also because I'm proud of what I'm doing--I wanted to direct you to the information about our library's Reading Buddy program that I've just learned how to post on the library website. Learn more about this award-winning reading enrichment program here and here! Your kids can even apply online to participate.

When my supervisor and I presented a session on Reading Buddies at the Colorado Association of Libraries recently, another librarian came up to us, thanked us for sharing the information, and said, "This is exactly what libraries should be doing, but we've moved away from this sort of thing." To see handouts from our talk (materials we use with Reading Buddies), click here and scroll to "Friday."

Let me conclude by tying my job into my blog: about a third of the Little Buddy participants come from bilingual homes (almost all with Spanish backgrounds, one from the Philippines). One of the moms submitted an application for her kids for the spring and told me that she specifically wanted them to practice reading in English, not Spanish, because she and her husband speak only Spanish at home. These girls are perfectly bilingual at ages 6 and 8! Then a dad turned in an application for his son. They're a monolingual English family--or at least they were until they enrolled the boy at Pioneer, the bilingual immersion school here in Lafayette. Now the parents are still monolingual but their son is learning Spanish! His dad asked me to try to match him with a Big Buddy who speaks Spanish. And finally, when looking over evaluations from previous sessions, it struck me that one parent of a Big Buddy praised the program for giving her monolingual teen daughter the chance to see what it's like to be bilingual.

linguistic epiphany!

I started my new job at the library in earnest this week--the grant that funds the Reading Buddies program was finally approved (later than the official notification date)--and have been running around recruiting participants and teen volunteers, updating brochures, revising the training manual, making plans, learning my way around computer programs that are new to me, and so on. (I have to ask lots of questions about things that seem so basic--where they keep the phone book, how to make the photocopier do what I want, how to check my own voicemail, etc. This is my first new workplace in nine years! I don't like feeling lost and inept. Fortunately those unpleasant feelings are already starting to recede.) Our first Reading Buddies meeting is Monday already, and I've only managed to recruit and train two teen volunteers to work with the ten elementary school students (they're supposed to be paired one-to-one)! But I'll keep looking and I think we'll be all right.

Anyway, what I wanted to post about today is an unexpected work-related conversation I had in Spanish. I took two semesters of Spanish in 1991, and then a Spanish review class about five years ago. (Katie was my teacher!) I also shared an office for a few years with native speakers who often conversed in Spanish among themselves. So the combination of the formal classes, the exposure from my colleagues, and the similarities between French and Spanish means that my knowledge of the language is better than most people who have only had a year of Spanish class.

But I've done almost nothing with Spanish in the meantime, even though I have good friends who are Spanish teachers and/or native speakers. Katie and Estela both offered to help me brush up my Spanish, but I never took them up on it. I've never spent time with the books I've bought in the meantime (simple stories, vocabulary lessons via comic strips, etc.). I don't listen to Spanish-language radio or watch movies in Spanish.

So just imagine the panic I felt when I called a parent on the waiting list (she wanted to enroll her child in the Big Buddies program) and discovered that she spoke very little English! But I actually managed to carry on an entire conversation--on the phone, which means no help from visual cues like facial expressions and gestures--and tell her who I was, when the program starts, and how to sign up. (Okay, for the latter I had to say "come to the library and write your son's name" because I had no idea what "register" or "sign up" was, but I think--I think!--she got the idea.)

It was exhilarating. This is why we learn other languages--not to conjugate verbs on tests, but to communicate about real things, in this case something that will help a child become a better reader!

It was also exhilarating to push past my insecurities about my pronunciation and lack of precise vocabulary in Spanish and just get the ideas out, although imperfectly. I wish that all of my former students from my French classes could have opportunities like this to challenge themselves, to realize that they can make themselves understood after all, that feeling too shy or embarrassed to speak French means missing out on a chance to share real ideas and exchange meaningful information.

new job!

In addition to the pregnancy, I have another change to announce: a new job! In between the two-hour commute (round-trip), the cost of gas, the insecurity of being an adjunct instructor (part-time temporary, never knowing from one semester to another if I'll have enough classes to have benefits, or even any classes to teach at all), and the fact that the salary is so low that it would barely cover day care costs, it made sense to resign from teaching at Colorado State. It was time to find something closer to home that I'd be able to keep doing even after Croissant arrives.

And amazingly, I did! You might recall that earlier this summer I did some contract work with the Lafayette Public Library helping out with the Reading Buddies, a reading enrichment program. They've now hired me to coordinate the year-round program! Here's how it works: a first, second, or third grader (the Little Buddy) is paired with a middle or high school student volunteer (the Big Buddy). The Buddies meet at the same time once a week to explore books together--reading, discussing, playing simple literacy games like Boggle Jr. At the beginning of each session, I'll meet with all the Big Buddies to present activities they can do with their Little Buddies and have them share issues that have arisen during their meetings. I'll observe and troubleshoot and be a resource person during the Buddy meetings. And then for the last 20 minutes of the session, all the Buddies will come together for a group activity--a library scavenger hunt, a presentation on a children's author, a creative writing activity, and so forth. By the end of the semester (or the summer), these group activities will turn into a project that the students can present for their parents, like a poetry reading or a readers' theatre presentation of a simple script.

Different groups of Buddies will meet four times a week, twice at the public library and twice at two elementary school libraries (as part of their after-school programs) in hopes of reaching not just the stellar readers who'd be coming to the public library regardless but also the kids reading below grade level who will really benefit from one-on-one attention from an older kid who is enthusiastic about books.

So I'll be in charge of recruiting the students, interviewing potential Big Buddies, training them, coordinating with the schools, and planning the sessions. And as the program is grant-funded (the library doesn't have the money to support it), I'll also be writing the grant applications that insure that Reading Buddies continues. (The grants will pay my salary, thus I'll be very motivated to make them as strong as possible!) In fact, we actually have to wait to hear if the most recent grant has been funded before the library can officially offer me the job. But the librarians assure me that we'll win the grant and that I'll be hired in September.

This is a part-time job that will require probably half the number of hours a week as my part-time university teaching did (when you factor in lesson planning, grading, meetings, and everything else that teachers end up doing) but still pay about the same. And hooray, the library is just three houses away! No more commute! No reason for me to be on the highway eight months pregnant in a snowstorm just to get to campus and have half the students email me to say that they don't feel like leaving their dorms to walk to the classroom!

Since it's part-time, I'll be able to keep up with all my other projects (like this blog, tutoring, volunteering at the library's Homework Center, my summer gardening misadventures, serving on the board of directors for CCFLT, and taking care of my nephew Carl once a week--and wait till you hear what he can say in French now!). I'll let the tutoring taper off as January approaches and then start it back up again if/when I'm ready. As for the Reading Buddies job, I may even bring Croissant with me--he/she can sleep in the office while I work (babies do sleep, right? Please tell me Croissant will nap!) and kids can read to him/her during Buddy sessions sometimes.

Most importantly, I love the idea that even though I'm no longer in the classroom, I'll still be involved with helping students learn!

PS: The worst part about taking the Reading Buddies job is it means that the creative and talented current coordinator, my good friend Estela, is leaving. Her husband is going to be a lawyer in the Air Force, so they have to move away. I'm really going to miss her and her family! She's raising her one-year-old, Dani, bilingually (English/Spanish), and Dani is just now starting to say more than "Mama," "Dada" (everybody other than mom, including me, is "Dada"), and "eee ya!" (like a little kung fu fighter). But Estela has promised to keep me updated on Dani's linguistic progress. Bonne chance et bon voyage!

summer literacy volunteer teaching

My tutoring clients are taking all or part of the summer off, and I went on five different trips in May and June, missing many of my regular Thursdays with my nephew, so I haven't had as much to report about children learning foreign languages. But I have been doing some volunteer work at Lafayette's Sanchez Elementary School as part of a summer school enrichment program. Another volunteer and I are spending Wednesday mornings there doing creative writing and readers' theatre with third, fourth, and fifth graders; I'm also getting paid to oversee the Lafayette Public Library Reading Buddies program at the school with the first and second graders (where middle and high school students spend time reading, playing literacy-enhancing games, and doing group activities with the younger kids). (The library hired me for that after paying me to write a manual for the Big Buddies with guidelines and activities and suggestions of what to do with different types of readers--strong, weak, easily distracted, and so forth.) This work at the elementary school seems relevant enough for me to tell you about it here on this blog, even though it's not specifically about foreign language teaching. (On the other, lots of these kids are bilingual Spanish-English speakers.)

The elementary school students seem to adore interacting with the big kids--they read a book or two together, discuss it, and play something like Boggle Jr. or card games matching words to pictures or Chutes and Ladders (transformed into reading games by adding blends or word families to each square). When I walk around the room eavesdropping, I hear the big kids asking their Little Buddies questions about the story and their interests, kids getting excited about books, kids laughing or smiling while their faces light up. Very cool. My friend Estela Kennen, a regular commenter on this blog, is the coordinator of the Reading Buddies program, which now runs throughout the year and will take place at the library and two different local elementary schools (it was initially just a summer program at the library). She's done fantastic work!

The most successful creative writing activity so far was when we played with lemons. Every kid received his own lemon and had to spend time using his five senses to investigate the lemon (some of them took these directions very seriously and licked their lemons!). I even asked them to put the lemons up to their ears and listen to what the lemon wanted to whisper to them. Then they wrote five-line poems using the letters in "lemon" (written horizontally, one letter per line) to describe their lemons. Finally, they had a choice for the most open-ended writing activity: either write and perform a commercial for the lemon or write an autobiography of the lemon. (I had had trouble choosing which one to ask them to do, but then realized that it didn't really matter to me and that they might feel more empowered by deciding themselves which task to take on.) The results were charming, and it was fun for me. (Next time, though, I might use lemon drops, because then the children can actually eat what they're writing about!) I can't wait till my nephew is old enough to do some creative writing!

more jobs for me!

The bad news: My school's summer study abroad program in Grenoble, France, which I was supposed to be the faculty director of this year, has been cancelled due to low enrollment (we were two short of the minimum we needed). I'm really disappointed--and if I am, imagine how the students feel! I was looking forward to showing my students around the city, seeing my friends who live there, buying books and CDs and cheese and chocolate to bring home with me--and to think that school would actually pay for my flight and hotel for such fun! Oh well.

The good news: Educational Testing Service has hired me to grade AP French exams in June. This entails seven solid days of reading essays 9-5! It'll be good for me (and my CV)--and it pays well.

The other good news: This week I started another tutoring job. This one grew out of the volunteer work I do at the Lafayette Public Library; I'll be working twice a week with a six-year-old who's having a lot of trouble with the phonics approach to reading. So while this tutoring isn't related to French, I figure it'll be worth blogging about because some of y'all are raising kids with English and another language; no doubt many of the techniques and games I try with her will be applicable to other kids.

The other other good news: The results of the Colorado Congress of Foreign Language Teachers are in: I've been elected to the Board of Directors. This means I'll serve on committees and help plan conferences and generally try to make the state a better place for foreign language teachers (and their students).

And speaking of work, the unsubstantiated gossip finally put to rest: I'm not pregnant, despite the fact that colleagues have been approaching me for a week to congratulate me on having a croissant in the oven. Turns out, one of the Spanish teachers was speaking French to a French teacher, who said something along the lines of, "I'm afraid we're going to lose Sarah sometime because she wants to start a family." What the Spanish speaker heard was, "I'm afraid we're going to lose Sarah because she is starting a family," and she then promptly told everyone else that I'm expecting. Grrrrr. No wonder people have been staring at my stomach in the copy room.