One of our many individual success stories is the story of Marleni Lopez, an eleven year old of Haitian descent
currently in the fifth grade. One of her DREAM teachers in the 2008-2009 Young Stars Program, Laura Budzyna,
shares her experience teaching Marleni in her emergent literacy class:
"When Marleni first appeared in my class, I wasn't sure what to do with her. She clowned around. She picked fights. She copied from her neighbor. She answered questions sideways by making jokes. Her behavior pattern smacked of defensive mechanism: she was trying to distract her peers (and her teacher) from the fact that she could not actually read the words in front of her.
Still, it was clear to me that there was a spark of intelligence in Marleni - a wisdom that needed to be tapped. Whenever I would read a story out loud, she was always the first to predict what would happen on the next page or to sum up the story's lesson without any prompting from me. She was interacting with text - responding, thinking critically, and ‘reading’ between the lines - she just wasn't decoding the actual words for herself.
I kept her after class one day to read with me one-on-one and to see exactly where she was struggling. We went through the alphabet, and I found that she only knew about 7 or 8 letter-sounds, and had no idea how to put them together. We started working on adding new letters and words to her repertoire - one at a time, session alter session.
Some time during that month, she had a 'click' moment. She told me, in no uncertain terms, that she was going to learn to read. She begged me to read with her every day after class. She started to sound out words around the room and in the street. When one of the boys in the class made fun of her for stumbling over a word, saying "She can't read," instead of reverting to one of her old defenses, she responded confidently, ‘I can read. I just need to practice some more. Right, Laura?’
And practice we did. We wrote journal entries, traced letters on each other's backs, went for word hunts in the street and reread her favorite stories. Six months later, the day I left Cabarete, I took one last walk with Marleni. She read the good-bye card I wrote her, without help, and confided in me her new dream: to someday open her own school to teach kids how to read.
Marleni knows the progress she has made. ‘Estoy leyendo ahora….’ When we evaluated Marleni using the Rigby system in September 2008 she was at a level 1. In April 2009, she reached a level 4, and in summer camp in July 2009, a level 7.”
Laura Budzyna, 2008-2009 Academic Year Volunteer
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Read Marleni’s testimonial here.
