Staying Home, Helping Out

The response was swift and enthusiastic. Like all other schools in the Commonwealth, BLOCKS has had to go online, and the program was delighted to accept Ramos’s help in creating age-appropriate videos for these very young students. BLOCKS offers classes in English, Spanish, and Portuguese; Ramos, whose first language was Spanish, got busy making videos of Spanish vocabulary words, songs, and poems, which the program shares as part of its online curriculum.

“Each week they had a specific theme,” explains Ramos. “The first was seeds and planting.” Ramos went online and found a poem to read, and made cards of provided vocabulary words to share with the students. The program was happy to have her contribution and asked her to continue for the next several weeks.

So each Sunday, Ramos has been spending about three hours researching content, creating materials, filming videos, and sending them along. “It’s fun,” Ramos reports. “I try to present myself in a way students will connect with and make it seem like we’re having a fun time.” And it’s given her an increased appreciation for the challenges of online teaching. “Oh my gosh, definitely!” she says. “This is for preschool. Imagine what our teachers have to do for every lesson.” But she enjoys the challenge and hopes one day to work with children in some capacity.

Thanks to her volunteer work with BLOCKS, Ramos sees a silver lining in the current situation. “It’s something I never would have expected to do, if the pandemic hadn’t hit,” she says. “But it is something to come out of all this that is positive. I’m helping my community, and it makes me feel like I’m making a difference. For me at least, I’ve been able to reach out in a very different way from what I’d be able to do if I was at school right now.”

And from that, she extrapolates an even larger takeaway. Even at a time when so many limitations are in place, she says, “everyone can do something to help their community, no matter how big or how small. We’re all in this together.”