Escuelita

Well, it's finally decided: Cora is going to attend Grand Rapids Christian Elementary School for kindergarten this fall. She was chosen via lottery to have the opportunity to be in the Spanish Immersion program, which was one of our choices. We weighed the pros and cons back and forth and decided to go for it. So she will attend school every day, but only in the afternoons. Her teacher will be speaking entirely in Spanish to the class and she will be learning to read and write in Spanish! In the SI program they start incorporating English phonics in second grade, so for the next two years it will be entirely Spanish.

One of the things that worried us is that she will be joining a class of students who have all (except for Cora and one other student) been in Spanish Immersion preschool for a whole year together and with the same teacher they will have for kindergarten. That means two things: she will be "behind" and she will be the "new girl". I was able to connect with the teacher and explained that I speak Spanish well enough (ha!) to help Cora learn some over the summer, even though I know we could never get her "caught up" to what the rest of the class has learned and acquired over the course of a school year. She advised me to focus on helping her learn the alphabet sounds in Spanish, numbers 1-20, shapes and colors. You can see the teacher's webpage here for what the preschoolers are doing and have learned.

I devised a plan to start working on this already, since I figure that with the lack of schedule that summer-time and a newborn baby will bring we better get some work done now. My challenge is that Cora has not been interested in learning explicitly from me and I am geared toward teaching in a high school setting. Not that I never tried to make things fun when I was a teacher but the fact is that high schoolers don't always appreciate goofy or silly and they (well, many of them) understand that their job at school is to learn the necessary material and many are motivated internally either to get good grades for one reason or another or to actually learn the language. Cora loves to play. Vocab lists and flashcards are not going to work. This is probably normal for a 5 year old! But my task is to help her acquire as much as I can, while not forcing or frustrating her and keeping our relationship as mother-daughter healthy.

My plan is called "Escuelita" which means "Little School". We've been spending 30 minutes each day doing Escuelita while Peter is napping . We've been doing it for about 2 weeks now and I think she mostly enjoys it. Today I was planning on skipping it since it is Sunday but she asked for it! We've been starting out with a little welcome song and then filling in "El Calendario" and practicing saying in Spanish, for example, "Today is Sunday, May 6" which would be "Hoy es el domingo, el seis de mayo." Then we do some different activities to practice numbers 0-10, the colors red, blue, yellow and orange, and letters a, b, and c. I mostly try to incorporate games like I spy for colors, or collecting items in each color and then counting how many red things, blue things, etc. She made a sticker book of the numbers 0-10 and has been very proud to read it to Daddy a few times. We'll incorporate more numbers, colors and letter, and then also eventually shapes as we go on.

At the end of the 30 minutes she gets a "moneda", a coin from Chuck E Cheese, and she gets to choose 30 minutes of either tv, a computer game or playing a game on my ipod. After she collects 20 coins she will get to go spend them at Chuck E Cheese. Maybe we didn't need the double reward system (the instant and the delayed/long-term), but I wasn't sure how she was going to respond initially and I feel like this will be a big accomplishment for both of us to just keep at it day after day.

So, I'm excited for her to have this opportunity but please pray for her for the challenges I mentioned earlier. All of her preschool class from this year is dispersing to different schools for kindergarten so she would be having to join a new school anyway, but I pray that she will be able to slide into the class, socially, without trouble and will find a really good friend. Also that the challenges of being in an immersion class won't overwhelm and discourage her but will instead invigorate and inspire her! I dream of someday being able to do a week long service project somewhere in Latin America together when she is old enough to come along and both of us being able to communicate fluently with the people!