By Rachel Li :
Background Information:
The Dandelion School is the first and only charitable, non-profit middle school located in Beijing approved by the government, working to provide access to quality pre-high education for children from low-income migrant families.
The B-Dandelions program is a partnership between the Dandelion School in Beijing, China and Belmont High School students to provide English lessons. By providing tutoring services to children of migrant workers in Beijing, students are supporting equal learning opportunities to students who are deprived of such resources, as well as helping them enrich their experience and gain confidence. At the same time, students living in Belmont will gain tutoring experience, be able to practice their communication skills, get to know student life in China, and also accumulate community service hours. Due to the time difference and school schedules, tutoring sessions are weekly, on Friday evenings, Saturday mornings, or Saturday nights. Mentors must be personally motivated and interested in performing this service. Preparing materials for each session (a set of Google Slides) is also required of tutors. Classes are held via Zoom and are about forty-five minutes long. Tutors can teach one or two students per session individually or collaborate with another person.
Tutors, Students, and Hours:
There are currently twenty-six mentors from Belmont and surrounding towns. In total, B-Dandelions has given over 1,110 hours of English lessons to these underprivileged students. We’ve tutored around one hundred students so far and hope to tutor more!
Writing Competition:
The B-Dandelions program was founded during the 2020–2021 school year. In an effort to allow students to be more engaged in writing, we hosted a writing competition. Any student from the Dandelion School was allowed to enter the competition – it did not matter if they previously participated in tutoring or not. The theme of this year was simple: write a story about a superhero! This hero could be from a fictional book, completely made up, or an inspiring role model. We were very impressed with every submission we received. Students showed off their creative side and writing skills. Many wrote personal stories about how events and people in their life shaped who they are as a person.
However, we needed to pick a few winners out of the hundreds of submissions we received. We decided to give participation prizes to everyone who entered a submission, as well as an additional prize and certificate to the top five stories. In order to choose only five submissions, we made five categories: most heartfelt, most creative, most well-written, most engaging, and most interesting. After picking our winners we shipped all of the prizes to the Dandelion School, where the students were excited to receive the prizes and hear the results of their hard work.