Kathy Pomerenk, Fundamentals of Literacy Program
When Kathy Pomerenk walked through The Children’s Inn’s doors for the first time in the summer of 2022, the magic of “A Place Like Home” hit her immediately. The retired Montgomery County Public School system special education and reading initiative teacher felt a tug on her heart to use her experiences and expertise to give back to Inn families as a reading tutor.
While a family’s primary goal is the health and well-being of their child, their continuing education remains important as they look forward to a healthy future. The Inn’s Learning Center, run by Family Program Coordinator for Education Cristian Lemus, serves as a vital resource for NIH patients, their siblings, and caregivers staying at The Inn.
“The Children’s Inn is focused on bridging the gaps in educational literacy and language for our families,” says Cristian. “Education is important to them, and the Learning Center allows them to continue to learn at their own pace while undergoing treatment at the NIH.”
It was in that spirit that in October 2022, Kathy started working with Bina (age 6) and Nza (age 9), two sisters from Kurdistan, Iraq whose brother Aza was participating in a clinical research study for Proteus syndrome. Kathy had never formally taught English as a second language before, let alone to children whose native language, Sorani, has no one-to-one correspondence with the Roman alphabet. So she did what any trained reading teacher would do: she started with sounds. She segmented the sounds of speech in words, stretching each one so the children could isolate and blend them. She taught the girls to use small colored tiles to represent and manipulate those sound patterns, adding and deleting tiles to create new words.
“We were playing this phonemic awareness game and Bina, the-six-year-old got how to represent the individual sounds in a word,” Kathy recalls with a smile. “She looked up and I could see the pride on her face. She wanted to continue with this activity because she knew she could do it. That’s a remarkable moment in a child’s development of understanding language.”
Kathy worked with Bina and Nza, each one in separate private lessons, twice a week for a total of ten months and over 100 lesson plans. Even after their family moved to Virginia to enroll the children in school full time, they continued to participate in Zoom lessons with Kathy from time to time.
Inspired by young readers like Bina and Nza, in early 2024, Cristian, Kathy, and two other volunteer educators – Susan Jaffe and Jaime Banks – piloted The Inn’s Fundamentals of Literacy Program. Using The Really Great Reading Program as a guide while focusing on the five pillars of reading – phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension – the program’s aim is to enhance literacy skills and close gaps in reading, writing, and spelling amongst young readers at The Inn. Currently, ten children between the ages of five and twelve have been assessed in its inaugural year.
While they have attracted participation from a few other siblings, most of their students are the patients themselves – all staying at The Inn for at least a few weeks or months at a time. The three tutors and Cristian meet monthly through the new Academic Instruction and Mentoring Committee (A.I.M.) to discuss their lesson plans, student updates, and effective ways to reach and teach the children.
In the future, Fundamentals of Literacy strives to reach more kids, more often, taught by more trained teachers. Kathy is encouraged by early successes and looks forward to both watching the fundamentals program evolve and adding more pilots like this one to address different educational needs at The Inn.
Kathy’s favorite thing about The Inn? “The kids, of course!” she quickly exclaims. “It’s the same thing that every teacher lives for; it’s that moment when a child looks up and they’ve got whatever concept you’re trying to teach and they feel proud, they feel ownership. And it just feels like such a celebration every time! It doesn’t matter how little it is. It can be the smallest incremental step in learning to read but when they get it, they know it, and we try to celebrate.”
Indeed, at The Inn, all big and little steps towards any goal are celebrated. The past year has been full of those milestones and accomplishments at The Inn’s Learning Center thanks to educators like Kathy.
To learn more about the Learning Center and volunteer tutoring opportunities, contact Cristian Lemus at [email protected].
