After participating in a 10-week English teaching program with K–8 students at the Diwan Languages School in Egypt, 54 Ideas Center volunteers bid farewell to their fellow students over their last Friday Zoom session. Dr. Andrea Dinan, director of the Ideas Center, organized the program with the intention of teaching English in an unconventional yet engaging style. 

While looking for virtual volunteering opportunities for the Ideas Center amidst the lockdown, Dinan learned that the Diwan School wanted a few teachers to help with reading groups. Dinan contacted the school and offered her Ideas Center tutors’ help. Her offer kickstarted a series of meetings with the director of their English Department, Islam Allosh, to coordinate the partnership. 

Towards the end of 2020, Allosh showed the Diwan School’s parents a video to introduce the program. Their reaction was of immense excitement.

“When they watched the video, they got more excited, and then I sent them a Google Form, and they started flooding the form, and we got almost 800 students [to] sign up for the program,” Allosh said.

The program was over Zoom from 8–9 a.m. EST every Friday. It included eight activities catered to enhance English proficiency for grades K–8. These activities were then categorized based on different grade levels in order to appeal to the student’s interest. Some activities included Storytime, Phonics, Craft and Connect, and All Around Me. Volunteers would read and discuss English books with students during Storytime, practice reading and writing skills during Phonics, make drawing and paintings during Craft and Connect, and teach new English vocabulary in All Around Me.  

The overall goals of these activities were to build up the students’ knowledge, as well as their linguistic skills. 

Staikos ’22, a tutor in the Storytime group, described a few fun activities she conducted to engage her first through third graders.

“We would read a picture book to the kids and then have them read [it] out loud. Then we would do little activities with the words from the story [such as] unscrambling words from the story, and they were actually really good at it. I remember [it] being … just a lot of fun,” Staikos said.

In addition to helping with English proficiency, Allosh said the Diwan students believed the program helped make the pandemic more “livable.” 

“The overall experience, part of it being a new experience, made it enjoyable [for] students to participate,” Allosh said. “[It] ultimately led to alleviating the [pain of] being [stuck] in one place [and] not being able to go out as they used to.”

In fact, both the tutors and the students want the program to reboot in the future because they enjoyed the experience so much. They believe that the connection established, although in an online environment, was an unforgettable one.

“We’re only spending an hour with [them] every week, but we have a lot of fun together and I think that contributes to the relationships that we [built] ... I think that would be great [if] we can do this again,” Staikos said.