Student teachers help Christina School District English language learners

“Where’s Ms. Ito?” Samar Jamoon asked as she walked into Brookside Elementary School in Newark on the first day of school in September.

Madoka Ito was the spring 2006 student teacher. After graduation from the University of Delaware’s master’s program in teaching English as a second language, Ito went to Tokyo, Japan, to teach kindergarten at the American World International School.

Brookside ESL students get attached to the student teachers, who work in the classroom daily for several months as part of their mandatory classroom training. Some of these are earning a bachelor’s degree and others a master’s degree at the University of Delaware. Student teachers continue to be “wonderful assets to the ESL program,” reports teacher Lisa Grimsley. In the fall of 2006, students in Grimsley’s class of 18 third and fourth grade students were greeting Gwi-Ja Park as their new student teacher.

	Fourth and fifth graders in Jo Gielow's beginning level ESL class practice vocabulary while playing "blink." From left to right: Anant Pathak from India and Hande Kibaroglu, Gonul Macara and Busra Akoglu from Turkey.

At Brookside, the home school for all of Christina School District’s K-4 elementary ESL students since 2005, an additional 22 younger children in kindergarten through second grade are taught by Jan Lefebvre and her student teacher Mary Kumar. Christina School District now provides the children with regular classrooms at Brookside so that they can easily join their American classmates in the afternoons after English instruction without being bused to other schools, as was done for many years previously.

Another group of 41 older students, aged 9 through 12, in grades five and six, learn at Bancroft School in Wilmington under the guidance of Jo Gielow. She is joined in her “wonderful, huge classroom” by student teacher Laurie Rohm and aide Jaimy Gillow, who also tutors at ELI some afternoons.

This is the 18th year that the Engllish Language Institute has provided classroom teachers for the local Christina School District.

All three veteran teachers are enthusiastic about their young students, who progress quickly so that they can reach the same level as their American classmates in English skills. After that, they are able to “graduate” from spending their mornings in ESL class to joining their regular classes all day. Countries represented in all three classrooms include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, China, Eritrea, India, Jamaica, Japan, Lebanon, Liberia, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Sudan, Turkey, Vietnam and Yemen.