The rewards of reading to children

For one year, I was a focus teacher for a team of eight kindergarten classroom teachers in a school where 95% of the population spoke Spanish. I was hired to help 5-year-olds learn all 26 upper and lowercase letters of the alphabet before the Christmas holiday. The ultimate goal was to ensure all students were able to read at grade level by the end of the school year.

I had taught English as a second language for 15 years and had written ESL curriculum, but I was still daunted by this new challenge.