LAGUNA BEACH : Volunteers Help Latino Children Learn English

Althea Hoffman, 64, held court over a small round table of wriggling kindergartners, focusing their attention on a row of colored blocks.

“This is one-two-three. Can we count these brown blocks?” she asked. Rearranging the squares, she continued: “Three plus one equals four. Can we do three plus two?”

At the next table, Roberta Schnittger, 72, quizzed a dark-haired boy: “Let me see six fingers. That’s five. Let me see the sixth one.”

Hoffman of Laguna Beach and Schnittger, a Laguna Niguel resident, are members of the Laguna Beach branch of the American Assn. of University Women, which is working to help El Morro Elementary School’s Spanish-speaking students keep pace with their classmates.

Two of the nine children who have gathered on this sunny Wednesday afternoon speak English fairly well, others barely at all. The volunteers speak English, making their points with gestures and repetition.

The “Help a Child” program, launched in 1993, dovetails neatly with the school’s new English Plus Project, which allows youngsters to receive after-school help with reading, writing and math.

Carol Redford, coordinator of El Morro’s English language development program, said the volunteer effort has been “extremely helpful” to the school’s attempt to help Spanish-speaking youngsters, who often appear to understand more English than they actually do.

“As you can see, I can work with much smaller groups when they are here,” said Redford, at a separate table with children studying the alphabet. “It just makes it so much easier. It allows for a variety of levels of teaching.”

El Morro Elementary School has the highest concentration of Spanish-speaking students in the Laguna Beach Unified School District.

Aware of the school’s specific need, the AAUW launched Help a Child last year, and the program now involves more than a dozen volunteers. In addition to working with youngsters who are pulled from regular classes to receive assistance, volunteers this year began entering the classrooms to help, Redford said.

“I’ll tell you, it’s a big treat,” Schnittger said. “I feel like I’m making discoveries along with them.”