Since its launch in August 2020, the Sacramento branch of AYLUS has been working hard to support Willow Way Tutoring (WWT), a local organization providing multilingual tutoring for Newcomer and Refugee Students in the San Juan Unified School District. Below is a summary of our activities as well as pictures.
Through WWT, the members of the Sacramento AYLUS branch have provided over 50 hours per month of tutoring to Newcomer and refugee students in 2020 (September – December) and 2021 (January – March). Please see Tables 1 and 2 for logs of our service with Willow Way Tutoring as well as Picture 1 for a collage of some of our sessions.
For the students who speak Spanish, AYLUS members, Nohemi and Avery, provide tutoring in Spanish. For the students who speak fluent Dari, Farsi, or Pashto, but little English, WWT provides paid translators to assist our tutoring of these students. In our tutoring sessions, we have helped with homework, addressed technology issues preventing students’ completion of or engagement in schoolwork, and played learning games to boost conceptual understanding of academic fundamentals. We’ve also led “hangouts” where students and tutors play online games together in English to build English fluency, confidence, and create a sense of social belonging to an academic community. We work with the same students each week, enabling us to not only see progress in our students’ academic efforts, but to also form the beginning of friendships. We have each seen firsthand how smart, resourceful, hardworking, and impressive these students are and what they have overcome in their efforts to gain an education, learn English, and make a home within a new country and culture. We feel lucky to have this opportunity with WWT to work alongside the Newcomer and Refugee students and support their efforts!
Table 1. AYLUS members’ service at WWT in 2020
Table 2. AYLUS members’ service at WWT in 2021Q1
Picture 1. AYLUS members serving at WWT
Cultural Events
In addition to helping WWT provide tutoring to the Newcomer and refugee students, we also helped host cultural events for these students for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Easter. For these events we helped assemble themed items for goodie bags and distributed them in-person to students and arranged and co-hosted virtual themed activities (movies, games, and hangouts).
For Halloween, we decorated a car and passed out the goodie bags candy at the local library, watched “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and played Pictionary and Bingo on Zoom. While few students showed up, this was expected and the endeavor was still considered a success. (Please see Pictures 2-4).
For Thanksgiving, we built on the success of Halloween and again made themed goodie bags, watched “Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” and played games on zoom. (Please see Pictures 5 and 6).
With pandemic restrictions somewhat lifted in April, we were able to help WWT provide in-person spring activities to their newcomer/refugee students. One Saturday, we played outdoor park games such as soccer and “Simon Says” as well as organized an obstacle course and egg hunt and handed out candy filled goodie bags.
