Palabras de uso frecuente de primer grado

Palabras de uso frecuente de primer grado

Lista 6	Lista 7	Lista 8	Lista 9	Lista 10	Lista 11	Lista 12	Lista 13	Lista 14	Lista 15
Amigo Ayuda Pero Dos Cinco Cuatro Tres Sienta Al hoy	Dìa Tiene Bien Otro Buena Màs Major Esta Grande tarde	Porque Frìo Viento Leer Quièn Contento Papel Vamos Tienpo lindo	Trabajo Largo Hermano Nombre Familia Pues Duermen Diez Feliz hablar	Salta Fin Libro Primera Escuela Este Adentro Ahora Buscar puedo	Algo Parece Mundo Tenemos Dice Hacer Bueno Ninguna Muy vio	Aunque Hay Detràs fueron Idea Nadie Luego Mueve Pronto mientras	Nos Decir Juntos Nuestra Alguien Nunca Desde Gracias Hasta vez	Entonces Haga Tan Conocer Gran Hacia Dentro Gente Aquel hizo	Cerca Nosotros Agua Pequeño Siempre Adiòs Conociò Demasiado Encontrò quedar

Facing Challenges as Dual-Language Programs Grow

Facing Challenges as Dual-Language Programs Grow

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, dual immersion, foreign language

By Eleanor Yang Su

At Chula Vista Learning Community Charter School, students are taught lessons every week in a combination of Spanish, English and Mandarin. The public school, which has more than 400 students on its wait list, is hoping to eventually add a fourth language, the principal says, to better prepare pupils for the global economy.

“I think as we become more and more globally aware, we’re realizing that kids need to be prepared to be competitive in world markets,” said Principal Jorge Ramirez. “Kids need to be multilingual and multiliterate.”

From Chula Vista to Laguna Niguel and Sacramento, public schools are creating dual-language immersion programs at a fast pace. The California Department of Education estimates there are 318 bilingual immersion programs in the state, up from 201 in 2006.

“We have more research now that shows students who develop two or three languages to a high level have certain cognitive advantages,” said Julie Sugarman, a research associate with the Center for Applied Linguistics, a Washington, D.C.-based organization. “They do as well or better than their peers in English-only programs.”

California has long been considered a leader of the programs, establishing its first in the early 1980s.

The dual-language immersion programs are not nearly as controversial as the bilingual programs outlawed by Proposition 227 more than a decade ago. Unlike the original bilingual classes, which catered to non-native English speakers, the new programs are designed to blend English speakers and non-native speakers, to allow everyone to learn a second language. Schools are getting around the bilingual education ban with yearly parental waivers or are operating as charter schools, which do not require the parental waivers.

About 50,000 students are enrolled in dual-language programs in California, state Department of Education officials say, and about half of them are English learners. Ninety percent of the programs offer Spanish as the second language, followed by Mandarin (4 percent), Korean (3 percent) and other languages (3 percent).

Two new Chinese immersion charter schools are expected to open in Orange County in the fall, and school officials in eastern San Diego County are planning to implement dual-language programs soon. Many existing programs are so popular that they have long waiting lists.

At El Sol Science and Arts Academy in Santa Ana, kindergartners are taught 90 percent in Spanish and 10 percent in English. Each following year, the language balance shifts closer to 50-50, where it eventually stays.

Monique Davis, the school’s executive director, estimates that a handful of students opt out of the program each year, but those who remain thrive. The school’s state API scores are 880 this year, up from 784 three years ago. It has received a California Distinguished School award and the California Association for Bilingual Education Seal of Excellence.

Dual-language programs typically follow a similar model, but there are many variations. Some programs split the English and second language 50-50 for all grade levels. Some also make sure there’s an even balance in classes between English learners and English speakers.

At Wedgeworth Elementary School in Hacienda Heights, students in the dual-language immersion program have their lessons taught half in Mandarin and half in English. Students are taught some of every subject in both languages, to become familiar with academic terms.

“There needs to be extra monitoring for these programs. Momentum is building, and you want to make sure it’s being done right.”

The program was created four years ago at the urging of Chinese parents, said Barbara Nakaoka, superintendent of the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District. Most of the students at the school are Chinese, but the immersion program also serves children from other backgrounds.

One of the biggest challenges is finding quality Mandarin teaching materials, said Bonnie Wilson, the program’s executive director.

“Most of our teachers end up creating their own,” Wilson said. “What they’re trying to do is keep up with California state standards.”

Dual-language programs across the state face similar hurdles. Finding quality teachers interested and trained in immersion methodology is another challenge. Then there are the critics – people who question whether public dollars ought to support such specialized instruction. Sugarman notes that not all programs are produced equally.

“Some are better than others,” she said. “Having a commitment to the model is important. Once you start tinkering, for example, adding more English out of fear that students aren’t learning English, the students are worse off.”

Dual-language immersion programs in California do not receive any special monitoring or funding from the state. They are not required to test or report results for students’ knowledge of the second language, though that is recommended.

And not all programs have thrived. State Department of Education officials say at least seven dual-language programs have been discontinued in recent years.

At Laguna Nueva School in Commerce, Principal Jose Franco says the dual-language program was discontinued because the school struggled to find qualified bilingual teachers. The program, which predates Franco, also struggled to maintain a 50-50 balance of English speakers and English learners.

Ramirez, of the Chula Vista Learning Community Charter School, remembers the struggles. For three years, the school’s state assessments were so low that it made the federal watch list. But now it boasts API test scores of 880, surpassing the state goal. In 2010, it was recognized as a California Distinguished School.

Ramirez says many dual immersion programs are effective, but the state needs to do a better job providing oversight.

“There needs to be extra monitoring for these programs,” Ramirez said. “Momentum is building, and you want to make sure it’s being done right.”

Eleanor Yang Su is a contributor for California Watch, the state’s largest investigative reporting team and part of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Learn more at www.californiawatch.org.

Literacy at Home

Sea horse & fish!

Kinder Parent Training

Kinder Parent Training

Parents had our third and final Kinder Parent Training, where Mrs. Keating shared some great ideas about helping our children with learning. 

In particular she gave us some great ideas about writing, using the web, assessing our own child’s writing using a rubric, and creating fun and interesting ways to incorporate math at home!  She also showed examples of books in both English and Spanish and where our children should be by this point in the year, if they are reading at grade level.  For the dual immersion students, reading has been a challenge for the teachers in locating in a sufficient amount of materials and for the students as they are required to comprehend and retell the story in Spanish.  In addition, parents were shown samples of students’ writing: proficient and weak papers were revealed.

I am so happy that the school provides this training for the parents.  The three sessions have been most informative and helpful!

Week 29, March 19-23

Week 29, March 19-23

This week has been almost uneventful.  I have heard that the students are testing this week, and parents will be given third trimester progress reports the week the kids return from Spring break. 

Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

---

March 17, 2012

Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.

In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.

Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.

The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).

In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.

Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.

Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a university in Spain. It is Pompeu Fabra, not Pompea Fabra.

Literacy at Home

The Lorax