This week was my first week in the school. I am feeling lucky to be working alongside so many educators who are thinking deeply about the work they do with young bilinguals. This semester I am working closely with two teachers: one in K5 and one in third grade. Both are brilliant and eager to try out new things. As we have been reflecting together on pedagogical goals for our time together, the teachers have both identified thoughtful places to start. I am geekily excited about both. As the semester progresses, I will go into more detail about our work together, but right now we are collecting some baseline data related to their goals.
This week I observed so many organic translanguaging practices modeled by both teachers and students. In the K5 classroom, this is really their first experience with having instruction in English (they also have instruction in Spanish, and their teacher is bilingual and from Colombia). I was amazed at how the teacher facilitated a beautiful interactive read aloud that consisted of the students mostly speaking in Spanish, and the teacher mostly speaking in English as she celebrated, paraphrased, extended and connected their thinking. It felt like a safe space to share thinking and knowledge in a language that felt most comfortable.
As the students moved into independent reading, they demonstrated emergent and approximated reading in both languages. My favorite might have been when a student was reciting Brown Bear, Brown Bear with rhythm and intonation using a book he created with only pictures to represent each page of the original book. They were happy, engaged, and learning.
When the teacher introduced me, she told the kids that I was learning Spanish, so they could help me with my Spanish by practicing it with me, and they could also try to use English with me. They were very excited, and I got a lot of questions both in English and in Spanish. Everything from “Where did you buy that sweater?” to “Do you know my cousin? She lives in California.” One student asked me what my favorite thing was. I told him it was my nieces, and after his writing station he brought me a gift…one of my favorite things.
This week I observed so many organic translanguaging practices modeled by both teachers and students. In the K5 classroom, this is really their first experience with having instruction in English (they also have instruction in Spanish, and their teacher is bilingual and from Colombia). I was amazed at how the teacher facilitated a beautiful interactive read aloud that consisted of the students mostly speaking in Spanish, and the teacher mostly speaking in English as she celebrated, paraphrased, extended and connected their thinking. It felt like a safe space to share thinking and knowledge in a language that felt most comfortable.
As the students moved into independent reading, they demonstrated emergent and approximated reading in both languages. My favorite might have been when a student was reciting Brown Bear, Brown Bear with rhythm and intonation using a book he created with only pictures to represent each page of the original book. They were happy, engaged, and learning.
When the teacher introduced me, she told the kids that I was learning Spanish, so they could help me with my Spanish by practicing it with me, and they could also try to use English with me. They were very excited, and I got a lot of questions both in English and in Spanish. Everything from “Where did you buy that sweater?” to “Do you know my cousin? She lives in California.” One student asked me what my favorite thing was. I told him it was my nieces, and after his writing station he brought me a gift…one of my favorite things.
It reminded me that we find ways to communicate via so many modes when we want to connect and build relationships. He worked hard to try to find the words to ask me in English what my favorite thing was, and he used his illustrated gift of my favorite thing as a way to connect. Trying English in that moment served a purpose as a way to communicate with someone whose first language was English. We could all learn a lot from this five year old: kindness and connection via any language or mode necessary.