CHINA GROVE — Brian Serrano is counting sheep, and he’s not trying to go to sleep.

He’s also counting pigs.

Ashlee Rhoades holds up a flash card bearing the likenesses of pigs and asks Brian, a kindergarten student at China Grove Elementary school, how many.

“Two,” Brian says, giggling. He’s right, there are two pigs.

Rhoades raises another card, the one with the sheep, and looks to Brian again.

“One, two, three ...” he counts all the way to 10. Right. Ten wooly white sheep.

Then Rhoades, a sophomore at South Rowan High School, holds up another card, this one picturing five green turtles.

She doesn’t turn to Brian this time, but to Jesus Romero, another kindergartner sitting right next to him on the elementary school’s hallway floor.

Jesus takes a moment, then begins to count off the turtles: “One, two, three, four ...” he says, pausing a little sheepishly. “... six.”

“You always say six,” Rhoades says, laughing and reaching out to tickle Jesus, who rolls over onto the floor and laughs at himself.

Rhoades is helping Brian and Jesus learn counting as part of a South Rowan FFA program in which high schoolers tutor China Grove Elementary students who don’t natively speak English.

The program recently earned one of its founders, South Rowan senior Jessica Skinner, the FFA’s national H.O. Sargent scholarship for diversity.

Tara Runion, the program’s co-founder, won the H.O. Sargent scholarship last year at the state level.

Skinner said the idea formed when students noticed communication barriers at their own school as the non-English-speaking population increased.

“There were a lot of students beginning to enroll with diverse backgrounds,” she said. “We weren’t able to communicate with each other, and it was causing problems.”

The South Rowan students already participated in PALS, a program aimed at teaching first-graders about agriculture. Language barriers made it difficult for many to complete classroom and homework assignments.

The high school students figured if they could help the children overcome those barriers early, the children, their teachers and peers would benefit later.

That’s also the idea behind the Rowan-Salisbury school system’s English for Students of Other Languages program. Rosemary Leech and Ellen Huffman teach in the program at China Grove Elementary.

The two teach students from every grade at the school in all subjects, pulling them from regular classes to strengthen their English skills, or to begin developing those skills.

“I’ve got a first-grader who just recently came who didn’t speak a word of English,” Huff said. “It’s basically like taking a newborn through the language process in a much shorter period of time.”

And though many Hispanics are moving to this area, Spanish is not the only language they help children make the transition from to English.

“At first, I thought they all would be Spanish and I would need to teach my students Spanish,” said David Cress, an FFA instructor at South Rowan. “But when we got there, we quickly learned there are lots of other nationalities who need our help as well.”

Thirteen languages are spoken at the school, including Portuguese, Ukwuani, Tagalog and Bosnian.

Some children have come with parents seeking good jobs. Some are sponsored by churches. And some, says Leech, are refugees from war-torn countries like Bosnia.

“They’re very eager to learn, and their parents want them to learn,” Leech said. “But I’ve found them to be shyer than the others.”

The teachers set aside time to help students with specific needs, such as homework assignments, but most teaching is done in groups, Leech said.

The South Rowan students — 28 this year, tutoring 34 children — help by giving them more intensive, often one-on-one, instruction.

“It gives them a chance to open up more,” Huff said. “They’re very intimidated in a large class.”

And the children look forward to the time spent with their high-school tutors, with whom they often forge personal bonds, she said. But it wasn’t always that way.

“It took awhile to get them to realize we were there to help them,” Skinner said. “But once trust was built, it became easier for them to accept us.”

Now, the children get excited on Tuesday afternoons, when the tutors are scheduled to come. When Skinner walked into the library one recent Tuesday, Jammie Southammavons ran to hug her.

Jammie, a kindergarten student whose parents are from Thailand and Laos, speaks English well but has difficulty comprehending, Leech said.

Skinner helps with shapes and colors, holding up cards and letting Jammie identify a splash of “blue” and a pink “heart.”

Each child has different needs, Leech said. And each child’s teacher decides how the tutor will help.

That could mean identifying shapes, naming the colors of balls used to make Christmas ornaments or even counting wooly white sheep.