Dual Immersion Elementary School: 7 weeks in dual immersion-Hispanic Appreciation Month

Dios Mio! (My God!) I have been busy. So I skipped I few weeks as I said I would from time to time. If you're just now reading please go back and see my first post. This is a blog about my experience as a parent enrolling my child in a Spanish Dual Immersion program. My son, Mason, is 5 yrs old and in Kindergarten. I am sharing this experience to help inform other parents of what it's like to be involved in a dual language program. I am not an educator or a native Spanish speaker.

We have been some "Busy Bee's". (school mascot). Since my last post it has been: Parent teacher conference, Road Runners events, book fairs, Dr. apts, and a Parent Advisory Council meeting. Fwheeww! I'm tired. Parent teacher conference was easy. It was just 20 minutes of the teacher going over how they test and how well your child is doing or not doing. Mason is meeting and exceeding standards. These are test that were given the first 2 weeks of school and they test again in December. They use a testing system called AIMSweb. It's new. They no longer do CRCT testing. Not sure this is it's replacement or not. I have received so much information the last few weeks no doubt it's all jumbled in my mind. I will try to post a pic of this evaluation for your viewing pleasure. Parent Advisory Council was a meeting I signed up for and didn't really know what it was going to be about but since I'm so involved I didn't care. It is a group of parents who sit down with the principle and some faculty and come up with ideas to improve the school and get other parents involved. This council is a requirement by Title 1 (a school that has 70% or more students on free or reduced lunches) There are 13 schools in our district that are Title 1. So I was given a huge packet of statistics and scores and was told to submit ideas before the next meeting. Ideas such as---What can we do over the Summer to help students and parents continue education, How can we better inform parents about things going on at the school and get them involved, etc. It was kinda like a PTO meeting but different. It was like "Fight Club". The first rule is you don't talk about it. The principle said it takes a special group of people to look at this provided information and see it as a useful tool...something good. She said that some parents would look at it an find 50 things politically incorrect about it. I imagine it's because it had a break down of scores between all the different ethnicity groups. FYI, Caucasian at this school had some of the lowest scores. But this doesn't scare me. You have to consider the balance. I transferred here so I'm obviously an involved parent. I'm going to give my child special attention. The Hispanics at this school, some of them, are pulled from class and given individual instruction. So in the long run they had better scores. I'm happy that they have someone to do that for them. Plus, we were told that GA sees it's self as an English speaking state so they do not recognize dual language programs so all test are in English. So the Hispanics are still going to be at a disadvantage if they don't get extra help in the area. That's all the time I'm going to spend on talking about that. You get the idea I hope.

Mason did 3 Road Runner races. He had fun. I recommend it. If you not ready for team sports and want to slowly get your child used to participation of a sport nature it's the way to go. Time wise it's not demanding. The book fair was good. Not sure if I mentioned it in the last post. Me and another parent donated a large amount of books to the classroom. Being a first year teacher, she was deeply appreciative. And just so you know; book fairs at dual language schools have Spanish books. So I bought a few. Mason doesn't' like me to read them to him he says they are "Too Spanish-y" I thought that was funny. Mason's 5 yr check up was good...a little late, but good. He's healthy!

My favorite event last week was the Hispanic themed Fall Festival. It was the first one in years that the school had done. They usually do a Spring Festival. It was a success. Naturally, I volunteered my time to help set up. In the parking lot there was some games and crafts tables set up for the kids. Mostly tossing a bean bag in some sort of hole, Piñata's, Paper flag making (Papel Picado Banderitas), and homemade maracas. You take a paper plate and fold it in half, pour some beans in it to make the sound, staple it shut, and then decorate it with paint/marker/streamers...whatever. But what was going on inside was the fun part. A local Mexican Restaurant donated the food. There was a Mariachi Band, and many tables set up to eat at. My neighbors made a huge stand up frame that was used for photo ops. There was a table set up about Hispanic culture. The kids had a great time. At first I wondered were the bouncy house was but then I realized it was more of a Spanish heritage festival than a typical fall festival you would see at a school. I loved it! Mason spent most of his time anywhere they had candy. The director of the DL program came up to me at one point and said, "If you had asked me where I was going to be teaching 10 yrs ago I wouldn't have thought I would be here". This was a good statement. I've heard this women say several times how passionate she is about her job and how much she loves every single one of those students and I believe her. I get warm fuzzies knowing that the people that surround my child all day are passionate about what they do. I can only hope some of that will rub off on Mason. I loved the mix of cultures that night. Seeing people together appreciating one another. That's what it was for. I had mentioned in my last post about how I wasn't sure how involved I would get to be with this event because they had a Latina Breakfast. I later learned that the breakfast was necessary to help get the restaurant and mariachi involved with the festival. One of the main goals is to get the Hispanic parents more involved. They want to be but a lot of them feel discouraged because they don't know a lot of English. I think the feeling is mutual. I'm not fluent in Spanish. Half the school or more is Hispanic. So we are working on bringing the two cultures together on mutual ground and opening the lines of communication.

Homework is our biggest obstacle right now. It hasn't changed since the last time I mentioned it. It's still cut and paste, and color the amount of stars that correspond to the number shown. Also, he has to write his site words and numbers. He hates to color. And he hates to write so this is a struggle. I wonder at what point I worry about dyslexia. He wants to write the numbers and letters backwards and I have to always remind him to read left to right. Right now I assume this is normal. Really, he's only been in Kindergarten 2 months. The verbal homework is easy. He will read me his site words and count to 100 in English AND Spanish. So I know the information is there he just doesn't like to write it. I also find the site words funny. In English right now he has words like: it, is, one, in, etc. In Spanish he has a site word that looks like: anaranjado (orange). Believe it or not, he does better with his Spanish site words!!! Once a week she sends home graded work. In class it's the same mundane worksheets we do for homework and they have a different letter they write every week. We made the mistake of letting Mason play the Xbox One over the Summer and now that's all he wants to do. All his other activities have limited. I know...bad parent. So he wants to rush through everything with the goal in mind that he will get to play his Xbox. I won't blame this on the game playing husband because he reads this blog. Love you honey! Ultimately, I'm the one here all week with the kid so it falls on me. I thought limiting it to one hour a day would help but he still wants to hurry through things. I hate to keep saying, "You can't do this because you have school", "You can't play your game you have homework", "You have to turn it off you have Road Runners." I feel like the bad guy and I don't want him to have resentment toward these things. But I'm trying different things. Trying to redirect his attention to educational games on the mobile devices but those get frustrating. Also, the Spanish songs are no stop which make me happy. He still goes around singing songs he learns at school. I know this program is working. So far we are all very happy with it. Mason tells me he loves his school often. He tells me he likes Road Runners. So if a little homework motivation is all we need then I say we are doing pretty good.

So I want to post a video of Mason doing some of his Spanish site word sounds. It's not all of them. Oh, and the video is sideways...sorry about that. My poor iphone video recording skills. I am also going to post some pics of the festival and Mason's parent/teacher conference. I really want to post some of the pics from the festival.

Please let me know if you have a question or just want to know something I'm not covering in my blog. I hope the photos and videos help fill in the gaps. Thank you for reading!