Making English Learning Fun

On January 4, Village Progress brought a group of 18 American high school students to teach English and art education at Dexin Elementary School. Using puppets to facilitate a little English teaching as we've done in the past, we were able to work with over 200 kids between the ages of 4 and 11 that morning.

Dexin, an organization that runs two schools catering to the children of migrant workers, orphans, and the mentally disabled, often finds itself lacking when it comes to non-memorization based English learning. As a fully donor funded school, it's teaching resources are often insufficient for the children it services. With a group of eager volunteers from a two week Where There Be Dragons-run program in Yunnan, joined by five students from the Kunming-based Princeton Bridge Year program as well as the Dali Bar staff, Village Progress is in a perfect position to begin to fill that need.

With a teaching-program proven to be fun for the kids and volunteers alike, we hope to be able to continue bringing this unique blend of art and English education to needy schools for many years to come. We believe that the students and volunteers all benefit, and that it's a way to, if nothing else, leave a lasting memory for underprivileged students of a time that they truly had fun learning English.

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We can't expect to transfer all that much knowledge in the two hours we spend in classrooms. Many of the students have little experience speaking English, and others at times refuse to even answer "What is your name" unless they can use their puppet to answer. However, so long as laughter fills the hallways as the students design their puppets and say their puppets' favorite colors, it's a job well done. If just 20 of the 200 kids we taught that day were inspired to try speaking English again outside of the traditional class structure, that'd be a success.