A Day in the Life

A Typical Day in the Life of a Full-Time ACEE Member

As a full-time member in the ACEE program, the focus of your day is one-on-one tutoring. Members typically have eight focus children that they tutor twice a week during 45-minute sessions. Tutors also serve as classroom support in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms when they are not tutoring one-on-one. As classroom support, tutors generally help with guided reading, math centers, and computer centers, play learning games with a couple of children, or provide re-teach instruction at a center. Members also get a 45-minute planning time that they use to prepare individualized materials and lesson plans for each of their eight focus children.

Each ACEE full-time tutor designs an individualized after-school partnership plan that can involve the following: teaching a class in the after-school program, teaching ESL to adults, helping their teachers to create materials/games for reading instruction, or working with a nonprofit that has an early literacy or family literacy focus (e.g., Reading Is Fundamental of Austin, Reach Out and Read, Literacy Austin, Literacy Coalition of Central Texas, Heart House after-school tutoring, etc).

Ongoing training is an important component of ACEE's success. Members attend a two-week Preservice Training and continue their education through weekly Friday afternoon meetings. ACEE members also attend Family Fun Nights (literacy-based family learning nights), AmeriCorps National Days of Service, and service projects throughout the year.

For more personal views of ACEE members' days, see the links at the right.

A Typical Day in the Life of a Part-Time ACEE Member

Part-time and work study members serve 10 to 14 hours a week at the Lucy Read Pre-Kindergarten Demonstration School in Austin ISD. Lucy Read is located in Northwest Austin near Northcross Mall. Our Lucy Read tutors need to have a total of 10 to 14 hours available in their schedules during the morning, because this is the time of day when most reading instruction takes place for prekindergarten students. Most tutors arrive at Lucy Read between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m. They receive training each week on-site from ACEE literacy staff.

ACEE members conduct small-group lessons in the classroom, library, and science Lab. Classroom tutors implement lessons that develop early literacy skills with an emphasis on learning about letters, letter sounds, and concepts about print. Library tutors implement literacy activities based on the unit of study. Science lab tutors facilitate hands-on, inquiry-based activities related to the unit of study. ACEE and AISD staff plan all lessons, and the tutors then prepare and deliver lessons. Here is what some of our current part-time and work study tutors have to say about their work with ACEE at Lucy Read Pre-K Demonstration School:

ACEE is not a job; it's an amazing learning and growing experience. The staff is incredibly supportive and the training is more than sufficient. There is always an amiable environment conducive to asking questions if there are any and exploring different ways of varying the lesson to fit the needs of our teachers and classroom. —Michelle Castillo, Classroom Tutor, 2006-2007

In the library, I get to work with many different classes and interact with quite a few of the ACEE members. The children are amazingly smart, and many of them are growing up with the great advantage of being bilingual. I love that ACEE accommodates the need for bilingual tutors because I also learned English as a Second Language. All the tutors at Lucy Read make it a great working environment, with the right mix of friendliness and professionalism. This is also true for our supervisors and staff at AmeriCorps. They are creative, innovative, love their jobs, and are very understanding of and flexible with our lives as students. —Amy Tu, Library Tutor, 2006-2007

I enjoy my experience at Lucy Read. I feel like I'm a part of the campus, not just the class that I work with. I like getting to work in different capacities in the lab, library, classroom, and portable and with kids from many different classrooms. There is always work to do, and I am never bored. The coordinators are good at keeping us busy with meaningful work. Also, the staff at Lucy Read has been very supportive, welcoming, and appreciative of our work. And, of course, it goes without saying that the kids are wonderful! —Sarah Daniel, Classroom Tutor, 2006-2007