Comments

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  Debbie Abilock October 22, 2017 at 12:30pm

  Re: Your LM_Net E-mail about pen-pals...

  What about the Olive Seed's Moroccan Library Project (https://www.moroccolibraries.org/)?  The teachers and students curate and care for small libraries of English books - they paint and fix up the space, learn to run a check-out system (https://www.moroccolibraries.org/erfoud-library ) – and read together after school. T
  
  
  
  While the interest level may be different, there’s a chunk of them who can read and speak only very elementary-level English – pen pals would be great. On the other end, we just graduated a student https://www.moroccolibraries.org/student-videos  who is going to college (whose mother can’t read).
  
  
  
  These are public school high school students who want so much to learn English but cannot learn it in school (which is conducted in Arabic & French).  We send only new books that are selected jointly by the teachers, students and a couple of us (https://www.moroccolibraries.org/what-we-do) – but I’m looking for more lasting connections among these students and ours .  We’ve begun to connect with those schools who are looking for service learning literacy connections with these students (Moroccan Muslims and Berbers), many of whom come from rural homes in which they are the first person to go to high school.  One school is going to share generational differences in each culture, another is going to build a “club” that will connect with a group of Moroccan students and create a project together with the school librarians.
  
  
  
  I didn’t mean to make this long “pitch” but, if you see  a possibility for a deeper connection between your teacher/students and these amazing teens, please contact me (dabilock@gmail.com).