Aprendamos
Want to see more digital stories created by the children of Aprendamos?
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Aprendamos would like to invite you to its 3rd Annual Photo Gallery
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The Aprendamos Program was adopted by the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, (IDEPSCA), on January 2008 with the purpose of developing a Family Literacy Project where parents, children, and all community members could learn together through popular education.
Program Description:
Aprendamos is an academic and cultural enrichment program that provides quality-education experiences for children and their families to enhance literacy and analytical skills in reading, writing, math, science, and multi-media. Every program cycle is thematically organized around collaborative projects that involve all students in learning for social justice, with an emphasis on arts, digital media, and cultural pride. Aprendamos employs popular education methodology in which each student is both a learner and teacher. Our curriculum is aligned with California state standards for each grade level.
Aprendamos Program student goals:
- Critical consciousness: Our students will critically analyze the unjust aspects of society; they will see themselves as change-agents; and they will understand how education/knowledge is a tool for social change.
- Critical thinking: Our students will see the purpose of academic skills; they will understand how academic skills fit together and connect to a larger purpose; and they will apply academic skills to think independently and critically.
- Knowledge and pride in culture/identity: Our students will develop knowledge of their cultural roots; they will feel proud of their cultural identity, home country, and language.
- Love & compassion: Our students will develop love for themselves and others; they will develop compassion for others; and they will understand how their actions affect others.
Thematic Units:
While the students learn to use arts and multimedia to document their realities, tell personal stories, and change their communities, they will be learning to use these tools with a thematic unit model of education. Themes such as community, identity, and social justice, are used to make connections in their lives between the various art forms and the themes.
Program Models:
Intersession Program Model
Originally, Aprendamos worked within cycles of five weeks with the estimated capacity of 80 students from K-3. These five-week cycles took place during intersession periods under the year-round track system in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) schools. While students were off-track (intersession) the Aprendamos program served as a space to enhance and support students in their education experience outside of their regular schooling.
After School Model
In accordance with LAUSD’s efforts to reduce year-round schools by 2012, some of the local schools we work with no longer function under a year-round track system. Instead of eliminating the Aprendamos program in the fall of 2009 Aprendamos created an after school program model to continue supporting children and their families after school during the academic school year.
Summer School Model
Summer school programs continue to be non-existent or inaccessible to the communities Aprendamos reaches. Therefore, beginning in the summer of 2009, IDEPSCA expanded our intersession program model to reach kindergarten through fifth grade students in an 8-week summer session Monday-Thursday 8:30 am-12:30 pm.
Morning Program Model
Is a six-week academic and cultural enrichment program that uses project-based popular education curriculum to support students before they begin their regular school class work during a Monday through Thursday 7:00am-8:00am model of education.
Aprendamos inside the Los Angeles Unifies School District (LAUSD)
Aprendamos partnered with the Youth Policy Institute (YPI) to help increase academic achievement in English Language Arts and Math for children in both Esperanza Elementary and Gratts Elementary School beginning February 2010 as part of the Belmont Full-Service Community Schools Project.
Parent Leadership and Engagement
Aprendamos does not work solely with children, but rather understands that in order to advocate and empower educational change in the communities we work with, parents and families of the children must be involved in the process. Throughout the course of an Aprendamos session, parents or guardians of the children participating in the program, are simultaneously engaging in diverse leadership workshops that provide the tools for parents to be active agents and decision makers in the academic lives of their children and education school reform.
