granteespotlight: Jumpstart
On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, six Jumpstart corps members in matching grey t-shirts prepare for the classroom session they're about to run at Frandelja Enrichment Center, a preschool behind Candlestick Park in the Bayview district of San Francisco . Team leader Yadira Alvarez holds up a poster with the lyrics to a song they'll be singing, two preschool girls look ahead at this week's book, Ezra Jack Keats' A Letter to Amy, and another cuts colorful tissue paper into rectangles for one of the craft stations. The six San Francisco State University students have been working as a Jumpstart team all semester since they went through six weeks of training together. Jumpstart, a national organization with a strong Bay Area presence, recruits, trains, and organizes college students to teach in high-need preschool classrooms, helping young students develop the literacy skills they need to succeed in school. This is this team’s last week of classroom sessions before winter break. They'll return in January to the same preschoolers for ten more weeks of teaching in the spring.
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