Green Eggs and Ham with a Twist

Each morning I tutor six Rift Valley kids for about an hour and a half. They're first and second graders, but because some of the kids have been at the Village for 2.5 years and some of them just arrived, their English abilities vary dramatically. Coming up with tutor material that suits all of the kids can often be a challenge. Lately I've turned to Dr. Seuss for help.

I honestly think I've read Go Dog Go at least 500 times, not to mention The Cat in the Hat, Oh the Places You'll Go (my favorite book), and of course, Green Eggs and Ham. And in the past few years, I've grown to appreciate these stories even more than I did when I was a kid. They're fun to read, they rhyme, and they present meaningful messages in really fun ways. So last week, I brought a Dr. Seuss book to life. We'd been reading Green Eggs and Ham for several weeks at that point, but never had I seen the kids so engrossed in the story. A plate of the fabled green eggs awaited them at the end of the session...

The way that the kids latched onto the green egg concept took me by surprise. Eggs are pretty easily come by here at the Children's Village. In fact, the kids eat a hard boiled egg every single day of the week at snack time. Twelve kids in Serengeti House means twelve eggs every day. So far I've been here for almost 60 days. That's 720 eggs for Serengeti alone, just in the time that I've been here. To further illustrate the point: the Serengeti kids have been here for two and a half years (that's about 900 days). One egg per day means that they've eaten close to 1000 eggs since they've arrived here! So you get it - eggs are not that special.

But Dr. Seuss' eggs are, because they're green, and they're scrambled. (The eggs the kids eat every day here are boringly hard-boiled.) So, one by one the kids wrote and spelled aloud the words I had chosen from the book: mouse, house, fox, box, train, rain, eggs, like, them. "Who can spell eggs?" I'd ask, and nine little hands would shoot into the air. We wrote, we spelled, we listened and we read til my heart's content, and at the end, as promised, the kids were rewarded with their green scrambled eggs...which took all of 60 seconds for them to eat. The funny thing is that we only have one color of food coloring here at RVCV--bright orange. And since I thought it was a bit early to change the green eggs concept, I used the next best thing to green food coloring: pesto. So the green eggs that the kids were eating were really plain old scrambled eggs drenched in pesto sauce. The uninformed eye would think it was the best meal those kids had ever eaten.

This short reading and eating episode turned into daily requests for green eggs. Little did I know how this would catch on! But eating green eggs all the time can get boring, so I had to twist the concept a bit, and bring out the orange food coloring to spice things up, so to speak. The next time we read Green Eggs and Ham, the eggs we ate were orange and tasted noticeably different from the first batch. Who would have known the kids would like plain eggs better than ones topped with frozen pesto..

A week after the second round of eggs, we had birthday parties here at RVCV. Birthday parties take place once a month; every house gets a cake for however many kids have birthdays that month. I stopped into Serengeti to watch the celebration and the conversation quickly (as usual lately) turned to eggs. Boazi looked at me with a hopeful and serious face, "Taylor," he said, "Can you mail me orange eggs for my birthday?"

Green eggs!