The Monday Night Crowd

Monday nights have been spent with this amazing group of eleven year olds around my table. Leonardo lives on the first floor of our apartment building with is parents. His mom is from Latvia and speaks English, she wanted Leo to speak English so she put together a group of Leo’s friends and I started an English class. Leonardo Bruno, Iulian Navalici-Valentino, Luca George Mitrache and Stefano Mihail Zibrava thundered up four flights of stairs each Monday. They teased and joked with each other in Italian but once they set foot in our apartment it was “English only!” All four of the boys had studied English at their local elementary school so they had a basic foundation to start with.

Monday Night English Class

Pronunciation again was the difficult part. It seems like once they have the first English class from a non-English speaker the speech patterns are set. Most of our time is spent in conversation to change those pronunciation patterns and some phrase and vocabulary were added to their war chest. The NAS Sigonella Base Library became a great resource. When they thinned out their outdated kids magazine section and I became the recipient of the throw away magazines. National Geographic, Animals and Highlights became a favorite with my Monday Night Crowd. They loved to read the stories in English, so that became their homework, to read English aloud to their families.

It was a pretty good combination, we spoke conversational English on Monday night class and they read English magazines during the week. They have made reasonable progress, their moms are very pleased and excited!

Missing Loenardo at the dentist office.