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One-Two-Three /Uno-Dos-Tres By JENNI SORENSON Community Resource Director
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incoln Park Preschool and Kindergarten constantly strives through reflection, self-assessment and experience to continue to improve and grow as a program and community. This fall we have expanded the scope of our Spanish language program. Each of our three schools staffs a full-time Spanishspeaking teacher. Formal large group lessons, informal small group activities, one-on-one interactions, and facilitated peer-to-peer conversations are opportunities for our students to involve themselves with the Spanish language on a daily basis.
Molly Rowan is the Spanish teacher at Lincoln Park Preschool & Kindergarten’s Germania school. She is a master's candidate in Bilingual/Bicultural Education at DePaul and has taught English abroad in both South Korea and Spain at the early childhood level. She believes the experience of language learning at a young age is invaluable. "Beginning language development at an early age when children still have the innate tools to form new sounds and structures is pivotal to future language success. By opening our students at LPP up to the sounds, vocabulary and phrase structure of the Spanish language on a regular basis, we are creating what I like to refer to as ‘flexible language brains’. Through this prolonged development, students with bilingual, in-person exposure at
young ages tend to have greater abilities for language development later. The development of these ‘flexible language brains’ provides for greater ease in future language learning.” The Director of our Belden school, Laura Clemmons, witnesses this in action daily. She shares, “It is incredible to see the way Spanish has enriched our environments. Not only is it spontaneous eruptions of counting in Spanish at the snack table, but it is the requests for “leche” instead of milk, or the children singing a new Spanish song as we trot out on our loops to the zoo that illustrate the acquiring of foreign language skills in our classrooms”. As a school community we are excited to more fully participate in the global trend of educating our students in a second language.
“Exposure to frequent and rich data (speech) through literacy, child-directed speech, song and games is consistently correlated with higher vocabulary volume and language processing ability. Second language learning is integral to this development. At LPP, the regular use of Spanish, provides a vast variety of language situations for children to collect and process new data and begin forming their own language output." Molly Rowan Spanish teacher Lincoln Park Preschool & Kindergarten
LPP Germania : 108 W. Germania Place, Chicago, IL 60610 • 312-482-9009 • info@lppgermania.com LPP Belden : 312 W. Belden Ave., Chicago, IL 60614 • 773-665-0110 • info@lppbelden.com LPP Webster : 2150 N. Lincoln Park West, Chicago, IL 60614 • 773-248-3381 • info@lppwebster.com
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