- Knowing many languages is the mark of an educated person.
- Many knowledgeable parents value the richness of exposure to multiple languages for their children in preschool and kindergarten.
- English and Mandarin are the second most commonly used language in this country. Early exposure to multiple languages will increase the child’s propensity for language learning.
- There are diverse students and parents in every school community. Exposure to languages, other than English, helps us create more “welcoming schools” for all children.
- Exposure to multiple languages provides a multicultural perspective that broadens children’s listening skills and intellectual curiosity.
- Learning the sounds of many languages increases a child’s sensitivity to the sounds of their own language, which supports phonemic awareness development.
- Optimum early learning experiences are rich in language and in the arts—it’s how the brain learns best! Thus we sing and sign to accelerate language learning.
- We are helping build a strong speech and language foundation now in kindergarten; this will help our children exceed the state speech benchmarks in third grade. Kindergarten is the optimum time to develop confidence and fluency in using language.
- Kindergartners deserve to memorize, recite, and perform many pieces of language; they transform print into sound, and then turn the pleasures of sound over to appreciative audiences so when they read silently to themselves, their inner voice clearly hears the sounds of language.
- In kindergarten we are developing a child’s speaking vocabulary that will later become a part of their reading vocabulary. Words like “Hola” and “Amigo” are working their way into our shared culture of common phrases in written and spoken communications.
- We want to help parents understand when the optimum window of opportunity is for language development and encourage them to expose children to the sounds of a second language early while they can best internalize the syntax of a second language.
- This musical approach to language builds confidence in our diverse learners.
- It strengthens emotional intelligence for children to develop confidence communicating in several languages and to realize there are many ways to speak.
- I am building children’s listening and focus skills to accelerate early literacy. I love to keep learning and expanding my own communications so I can better meet diverse learning styles in this school community.
- I am building flexibility and focus…Research on language acquisition shows that bilingual children can more easily focus and tune out distractions.
- These songs teach familiar cultural sequences (like days of the week and months of the year) that will be the oral language foundation of many of the pieces my children will not only memorize and perform, but read and illustrate in their “I Can Read” notebook.
