HOPE VALLEY — Students in Grades 2 and 4 at Hope Valley Elementary School had a special treat waiting for them when they returned from their Christmas holiday: letters from their pen pals in Spain.
Dori Carpenter teaches Spanish at the school as part of Chariho’s world languages program. The letters from the Spanish children, who attend two schools, one in Seville and the other in El Puerto de Santa Maria, are written in English and the Hope Valley students are writing back in Spanish.
“They mailed them before Christmas and they arrived the day after we returned from Christmas break,” she said. “In my mailbox was this big envelope and they had all of the little envelopes inside of it, all addressed individually to them. They were already assigned a person, so as I passed them out, they all had their names on them, so they were really excited.”
Since the specialty of the school is performing and visual arts, the fourth-graders from both countries went a step further and made videos.
“The videos are fun, too, because you get to see the person in action. You get to hear them speaking. So the fourth-graders got to hear a true Spanish accent,” Carpenter said.
Hope Valley school received a national Champion Creatively Alive Children grant from the crayon maker Crayola LLC and the National Association of Elementary School Principals in 2019, consisting of $2,500 and an additional $1,000 in Crayola products.
In addition to encouraging children’s creativity in schools, the objective of the grant is to raise cultural awareness.
Hope Valley Principal Giuseppe Gencarelli said the grant has also encouraged collaborations between different departments at the school.
“What this grant has done is allowed Dori to plan with the art teacher and with the classroom teachers,” he said. “So that’s been a nice tie-in where there’s been more plan time to incorporate different parts of the curriculum.”
Carpenter said she hoped to bring more art into the pen pal program.
“We’d like to integrate it more with what they’re doing in art as well and send our pen pals in Spain some of the things we’re working on in art class,” she said. “We’d love to be able to do a different video, or later, where we talk about something cultural here and they explain something cultural there, like the holidays, things like that.”
The Hope Valley children are writing their letters in Spanish now, and Carpenter said she hoped to be able to get in one more exchange before the end of school.
“We’d like to keep going,” she said. “The handwritten letters take time. It takes time to write it and the mailing process ends up taking a while, going from one country to the next. We’d like to be able to at least get in one more letter by the end of the year.”
Second-grade teacher Mary Ann Mello said her students were excited to be able to put the Spanish they are learning to practical use.
“Having the Spanish pen pals has allowed us to make real life use of the skills we are learning in second grade,” she said. “The students are excited not only to receive a letter from their pen pal but they are excited to write as well.”
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Pen pals make Spanish come alive for Hope Valley students - The Westerly Sun
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