Hallay Cagle remembers when it hit her.
“A little boy came in and he was in first or second grade, and his mom was really upset,” she said.
The mom didn’t speak English but through a translator Cagle learned that the little boy hadn’t made it to the bathroom in time at school and had been sent home. He was embarrassed, upset and on top of that, he thought he was in trouble.
“It all came down to the fact that he couldn’t say in English, ‘I need to go to the bathroom,’” she said.
And for Cagle, that just wasn’t OK.
“I knew we needed to do something about this,” she said.
From that experience English as a Second Language (ESL) classes for preschoolers were started in Montgomery’s Mixteco community, a people group from southern Mexico that has its own language.
“We found that over the years when the Mixteco kids would go to school they would really struggle because they wouldn’t learn English until they started kindergarten,” said Cagle, a member of Morningview Baptist Church, Montgomery, who runs Every Tribe Ministries as an outreach to the Mixteco community.
So the kids would struggle to learn, struggle to engage and would often be held back, she said.
“It was because of (those situations) that we started the preschool ESL in the summer four years ago,” Cagle said. “It’s not anything like a normal classroom setting — it’s all just interactive play.”
At each station, two tutors engage a small group of children, constantly repeating words and phrases to describe what the children are playing with.
“Because it’s not pressured learning, they pick it up fast,” Cagle said.
Most of them start speaking words by the middle of the summer, and by the end of the summer, they’re speaking in phrases, she said.
“Our goal is for them to start when they’re 2 years old and have a really good foundation by the time they start kindergarten.”
And the goal also is to engage them with the gospel while meeting a practical need, said state missionary Kristy Kennedy, who leads ESL ministry efforts for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions.
This summer volunteers from Baptist churches all across Alabama are helping ramp up Cagle’s ESL classes for preschoolers into a full-scale Vacation Bible School (VBS) effort.
“What’s going to happen with ESL this summer is going to be huge,” Kennedy said. “There are 5,000 Mixteco in Alabama, and we’re just finding more and more of them all the time.”
And the ESL emphasis isn’t just for the preschoolers — every Thursday during the summer, classes also will be offered for Mixteco women.
“They don’t have a written language — it is all oral,” Kennedy said. “So when they learn English, they will be starting from scratch. They are going to have to learn to hold a pencil just like kindergarteners. That is going to be very different for us as far as adult ESL goes.”
Other churches may be able to leverage ESL for the gospel during VBS by offering English classes for adults while their children are participating in the regular VBS program with the rest of the children.
“People have been calling and asking how to integrate ESL into their VBS programming, and I’ve been really researching that,” Kennedy said. “We’re trying it this summer and we’re going to start promoting it more and more.”
It’s a way to retool VBS to meet the needs of immigrants, she said.
And Lisa Rose, director of community ministries for Montgomery Baptist Association, said VBS can be such an effective tool to share the gospel.
“Vacation Bible School has always been a great way to reach the community,” she said. “By using Vacation Bible School to reach the nations right here in Alabama, even more families have the opportunity to have an encounter with Christ.”
Reaching parents
Her hope, she said, is that as VBS is held “in a neighborhood saturated with an indigenous people group, not only will the children have the opportunity to know Christ, but the parents will have that opportunity as well.”
For more information about holding an ESL VBS in your area, contact Kennedy at 334-613-2311. For more information about volunteering with the Mixteco VBS in Montgomery, contact Rose at 334-271-6227.
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