Teaching Update, or, Insist on Language over English

It has been brought to my attention that I really haven't spent much time sharing about my experiences teaching. For the past month I've been teaching English at a small elementary school in my neighborhood called Escuela Canitas. The school only has two classrooms to serve for grades "kinder" through 6th. There are about 23 students in grades 1-6 and I think the kindergarten group is around the same size. The school building also has another, equal-sized room for a cafeteria. The faculty/staff consists of one lunch lady (forgive me if that term isn't PC), one kindergarten teacher, and me and a long-term substitute teacher for the older students (the teacher who normally would be there is having some health issues). Each weekday morning, I walk about fifteen minutes to the school and arrive around 9:30 am. After arriving, I usually wait a little while before beginning to teach the class of students grade 1-3. After that class ends for their lunch, I eat with the kids and then return for the 4-6 class. While each class is a manageable size, the real challenge is teaching a class to students from very different stages in their development; while there is one girl in the morning class who has learned to read and previously learned quite a bit of English, all the others in this group are basically starting from scratch with learning a second language, and the youngest haven't even mastered reading. Again in the older group there is one girl who knows a lot of English (in her case from living in the United States for an extended period of time) and all of her peers are far, far behind her level. With this group, I have gone from thinking that I could get them writing short passages in English - which I would then try to publish in a short book - to deciding that I should instead teach them the grammar of their own language as a way of preparing them to more easily learn any number of languages later. If these students later attend the local high school, they will likely have another opportunity to learn English, and I think it would be a better use of my brief time here to lay down a strong foundation for general language learning than to insist that these kids memorize a list of common words and phrases.

I think Ms. Ryan would support my decision. Would you?