SanTan
FAMILY FUN
Sept. 5 - Sept. 18, 2015
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Bilingual education can help children succeed as adults By Alison Stanton
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Growing up in Chile, Mariela Cortez Pereira began taking English classes in the seventh grade. Although she is bilingual and speaks English very well, Pereira said she never mastered writing English and speaks with an accent. She knows the importance of being bilingual though. So she and her husband, Stephen Barnes, opened Casa del Nino Bilingual Montessori School in Chandler in August 2012. Their goal is to have students who are fully bilingual—which she said means they can read, write, comprehend and speak two languages without an accent. Pereira said about 65 students ages 2 through 9 attend the school, which she called the area’s only truly bilingual Montessori school. Because she wants students to learn to understand people with different Spanish accents, Pereira said she hires teachers from a variety of Spanish-speaking countries, including Spain, Guatemala, Mexico and Chile. One teacher in each classroom must be born and raised in the United States, while the other is native to Latin America. In the pre-primary classroom for children ages 2 and 3, Pereira said the main focus is to train the brain to understand Spanish. In the primary class, which is for kids ages 3 to 5, Pereira said the students start to learn to read and write in both languages and, by the end of kindergarten, they can also speak Spanish in small sentences. Lower and upper elementary students continue their bilingual education while learning a variety of subjects including social studies, science, math and more. “Young children don’t discriminate between a first and second language; they just accept that there are two words for everything, like ‘table’ in English and ‘mesa’ in Spanish,” she said When Spanish is introduced to children younger than 7, they will simply end up having two native languages. In addition to learning a second language fluently, Pereira said there are many other benefits for children being bilingual. “Children who are bilingual can comprehend words better than people with just one language; they are all at a very high level of comprehension,” she said. “They are also very open to new cultures and people who look different, so socially being bilingual is a great benefit because the children have an open mind.” Phoebe Walsh, 9, is in her fifth year of bilingual education. Pereira said that Phoebe, who is in fourth grade, can already speak Spanish in the present, future and past tenses. “She can also spell better in Spanish than in English and she is already learning Spanish at a high school level,” Pereira said.
Phoebe Walsh said she likes learning Spanish at Casa del Nino Bilingual Montessori School in Chandler. She hopes to use her Spanish skills when she’s older to travel to other countries. Submitted photo
Phoebe, whose favorite subject is math, said she likes attending a bilingual school. “I like my teachers because they are nice, and I have English in the mornings and Spanish in the afternoons,” she said. Although she talks mostly in English with her friends at school, Phoebe said she speaks Spanish with a young boy who is from Spain. Phoebe also enjoys speaking Spanish at home to her mom, who is not bilingual and, admittedly, is not sure what she is saying. “I also like to make my mom read books in Spanish,” she said. Phoebe said she hopes to continue learning a second language. “I want to learn more Spanish when I get older, and I want to travel to different places,” she said. That said, Phoebe would follow the trend that children who become bilingual at an early age feel comfortable moving to another country as adults. “It’s normal for them to feel they can live in another country because they are already bilingual, and they have been relating to this other culture their whole life,” she said. “They don’t feel like they belong to a country; they feel more like they belong
to the world.” Casa del Nino Bilingual Montessori School is located at 2625 W. Queen Creek Rd., Suite 6, in Chandler. For more information, call (480) 963-2550 or visit casadelnino.co. Alison Stanton is a freelance writer who lives in the East Valley. She can be reached at Alison@SanTanSun.com.
RESOURCES Websites http://bit.ly/1wp46mF http://to.pbs.org/1Vuu6ra Books “The Bilingual Edge: Why, When, and How to Teach Your Child a Second Language,” by Dr. Kendall King and Dr. Alison Mackey “7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child,” by Dr. Naomi Steiner and Dr. Steven Parker “Be Bilingual—Practical Ideas for Multilingual Families,” by Annika Bourgogne