The big story today was one of our ESL students. We had students pretend that the President was going to cancel the patriotic holidays we had studied. In order to keep these holidays, we asked the students to write letters to the President to show him why these holidays (specifically the Fourth of July) were important. The ESL student I mentioned earlier struggled with this assignment. When it came time to write the letter, he just sat at his desk staring at the paper. I approached him to see if he needed any help or had any questions (and to make sure that he understood the assignment). He was nonresponsive to most of my questions. Then I attempted to walk him through the assignment. I asked him about the structure of a letter and he was able to explain this to me. But when I asked him about the content of the letter, he was very curt. I believe I specifically asked him why the Fourth of July was important; he responded, “it’s not.”
Throughout the previous three lessons in this unit we had been very careful to include our ESOL students. For some reason, it had slipped our mind that a first grader—who hadn’t been in the United States long enough to even witness a Fourth of July celebration—might not be able to step outside of his own experience to objectively evaluate the importance of a patriotic holiday to a country and culture that were not his own. Lucky for us, there happened to be a Korean mother in the room helping and between her and the classroom teacher we were able to get the student back on track and have him at least complete the assignment.
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