Where Children and parents can discuss their thinking, ideas and the world!
Dear Parents and Children, Welcome to a new year of learning English and discovering the world. For those of you who are continuing the journey of language discovery and exploration with me, I am so happy to work with you again! For those of you who are new to our program and my classroom, I hope that you will explore the different ways to communicate and learn in English and in your home language. My philosophy of teaching English as a second or new language is rooted in using everything you already know in your own language and helping you to discover how to make those language connections to transfer what you already know. Learning languages is a skill that serves us in many ways - we learn about different cultures, we are able to think about language and use what we know to make connections and research has shown that "Rather than causing confusion, it is now understood that the constant need to manage attention between two languages fosters children’s thinking about language per se, and leads to increased metacognitive and metalinguistic skills (Bialystok, 2007) http://ilabs.uw.edu/Bilingual_Language_Learning_in_Children.pdf This year, we will have many opportunities to work together creating a strong connection between home and school. It is my hope to be able to learn from your culture and to integrate that knowledge into my teaching. As always, I encourage you to continue to speak your home language, to read to your children good literature from your culture, to have meaningful conversations in your language and to try to develop a rich vocabulary and a variety of concept or content knowledge. My door is always open so please contact me if you have any concerns or if you are interested in learning more about raising bilingual children or ways to help your children become bi-literate.
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