Finley Students Write to Peers
in Ecuador
Ingrid Moreira had an idea. The J. Taylor Finley Middle School foreign language teacher asked her students to write a letter in Spanish to children living in Ecuador. It opened a whole new world to the teenagers.
"Before I assigned the letter, I did a listening activity about a true story concerning a mission trip that I took to South America in 2008," Ms. Moreira said. "The students were so touched by what I described to them. One of the stories was about how children in Ecuador take care of their pencils like a precious jewel."
Ms. Moreira told her students that her friend, Solange Lombardi, who works at Hofstra University, was traveling to Ecuador on a mission trip to the same location the Finley teacher journeyed to four years ago.
"They thought it was a great idea to give back to the children of Ecuador who don't have the school materials we have here," Ms. Moreira said. "My students were very happy to send pencils, children books and their Spanish letters to the mission teams." Additional mission teams have traveled to countries in Africa as well as Armenia, El Salvador, Haiti, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Costa Rica.
"My student teacher, Kristal Cardenas helped us collect all the school items and the letters from our dual language students in seventh and eighth grades," Ms. Moreira said.