Teaching Pedro to Read

When my husband was working as technology director at a local elementary school, he kept talking about the difficulties the first grade teachers were having with their students. Many of the kids were Hispanic, new to school and often not too familiar with English. I told him I wished I could help, so he took me at my word and volunteered me.

After the first day of trying to work with groups of children, I told the teachers I would prefer to work one-on-one as I couldn't deal with several students at once. So after that, I would take one child, or no more than two, and work with them outside the classroom. Mostly I helped with spelling and reading. It was always a thrill when students I had worked with all week made 100 on their spelling tests on Friday. I always had little gifts to give them as rewards. I also found many of them were starved for attention and affection, of which I had plenty to go around.

One day one of the first grade teachers asked me to take Pedro (not his real name) out and just try talking with him. He was the size of a small four-year-old, and so quiet that she didn't know whether or not he even spoke English. Soon he started to come out of his shell and I learned he spoke excellent English. His main problem was that he didn't know the alphabet and didn't care to. He had been enrolled in our school system in the first grade the year before. The teachers soon realized he wasn't ready for first grade, so sent him back to kindergarten. I say sent him back, but he probably had never attended kindergarten at all. Soon his family moved away, and then moved back the following year, again enrolling him in the first grade.

I tried flash cards with the letters of the alphabet on them, but he knew few of them, and used the Spanish pronunciation on some of the ones he did know. He appeared to be a very bright little boy, but totally bored with the whole thing. Finally, after listening to his conversations, I realized he was crazy about animals, especially wild animals.

So I bought a set of plastic animals, printed the name of each one on a sheet of paper, and set each animal above its name. I asked him if he would like to have the animals, and told him that if he wanted them, he could earn them. All he had to do was to learn to tell me the letters in each animal's name. In a couple of weeks, he had earned all the animals.

Then I started trying to show him the purpose of learning the alphabet. For some reason, he hadn't made the association between the letters and reading. It took a long time, due to the fact that he was often sick and absent from school, but finally he started to catch on. One day it seemed that I saw a light go on and he was eager to read.

I decided to make a book for him that he could learn to read, using the names of the animals he had identified. I went to the computer and typed up each page: "Ape ate an apple;" " Bird bit a bug;" " Cat ate cake;" etc. down to "Zebra zapped zucchini," with a picture of a zebra standing beside a microwave oven with a plate of zucchinis nearby. The last page said, "What Did You Eat?" which I also put on the front as the name of the book. Each page had a picture of its subject, mostly downloaded from the net. Some I had to draw and color, which supplied Pedro with a lot of extra entertainment because I'm not much of an artist. The idea was to use each letter on its page as many times as possible. I arranged the pages to print out in the correct order so they would line up right when the pages were stapled together to assemble the book.

Soon he was reading his book and eager to read more. By then, though, he was far behind the rest of his class. A serious injury in April of that year kept him at home for the rest of the year. So he had to repeat first grade the next year, which was probably a good thing. And because of his injury, he could say, when asked, that he hadn't passed the year before because of having to miss so much school.

Pedro is now in the fourth grade and doing well. He reads better than his older brother and is an absolute whiz at math. It always pleases me to see him doing well because I feel I might have had a hand in it. With so many others to deal with, his teacher just didn't have the time to spend with him individually in order to help him get started.

He likes to come to our house and often stands and looks at the books in our bookcases for a long time. I can sense in him a hunger to learn. I would like to give him a bookcase filled with books, but families in his situation shy away from collecting much. They tend to move often and travel light.

His father keeps talking about moving back to Mexico permanently, and I can see the dismay on the faces of Pedro and his brother. Knowing he may not have many more opportunities to learn as he has in the past five years, I encourage him to learn all he can here and after returning to Mexico. I remind him over and over that education can be his way out of the poverty in which he has always lived.

After working with these little children for a couple of years, I believe more strongly than ever that anything one can do for a child will never be wasted.