Teaching Grandpa
A personal story about a teenage girl who teaches her grandfather to read English so he can read letters from his grandchildren in Canada.
Tap any word to hear it · dotted words have a definition in the glossary
🎧 Listen
1When I was fifteen, my grandfather David surprised me with a strange . He wanted me to teach him to read English. Grandpa came to Israel from Morocco, and he worked for forty years as a in Be'er Sheva. He speaks Hebrew, Arabic and French, but he never had the chance to learn English at school.
2At first I thought he was joking. 'Why now, Grandpa?' I asked. He explained that my aunt and her family had moved to Canada, and his grandchildren there were growing up speaking mostly English. 'They write to me, and I can't read their letters,' he said quietly. 'I don't want to need someone to my own family for me.'
3We started the next week. Every Tuesday after school, I sat with him at his kitchen table. I was because I had never taught anyone anything. My first plan was to use my old school textbook, but it was full of exercises about shopping malls and pop music, and Grandpa looked bored. So I changed my . Instead of the textbook, we read the short messages his grandchildren sent, word by word.
4It was not easy. Some weeks he forgot words we had many times, and once he closed the notebook and said he was too old for this. I told him that I also forget words, and that mistakes are part of learning. The next Tuesday he was waiting for me at the door.
5After six months, Grandpa read a whole letter from my cousin Daniel without my help. He laughed at a joke in it before I even understood it myself. Then he picked up a pen and wrote his first in English: three short sentences, with one spelling mistake.
6Teaching him changed me too. I learned to be , and I discovered that a teacher sometimes learns more than the student.
📘 Glossary
- request - something you ask for politely
- carpenter - a person who makes things from wood
- translate - to change words from one language into another
- nervous - a little scared or worried
- method - a way of doing something
- practised - did again and again to get better
- reply - an answer to a letter or message
- patient - able to wait calmly without getting angry
Questions
Finding details
1. Why did Grandpa want to learn to read English?Finding details
2. Give TWO languages that Grandpa could already speak before the lessons.Finding details
3. Why did the writer stop using her old school textbook?Reference words
4. What does the word 'it' in the sentence 'but it was full of exercises' (paragraph 3) refer to?Finding details
5. Complete the sentence: Once, Grandpa closed the notebook because he said that ____.Making inferences
6. What can we learn from the sentence 'The next Tuesday he was waiting for me at the door' (paragraph 4)?Finding details
7. What happened after six months?Word meaning
8. The word 'patient' in paragraph 6 means ____.Main idea
9. What is the main idea of the story?
✍️ Writing task
Write about a time when you taught someone something, or when someone taught you something important. What happened, and what did you learn from the experience?
80–100 words
0 words
Answer every question to get a score (0/9)