Ocean animals was the theme in pre-kindergarten classes at a California school in early May. Some pre-K teachers introduced “octopus” and “tentacle,” while others taught “pulpo” and “tentaculo.” In all the pre-K classes, children acted out vocabulary words with hand movements, sang songs, and played a guess-the-ocean creature game. Then they moved to tables, where some of them painted paper octopuses, while others gingerly smelled, touched, and then dangled little octopuses from a local fish market.
Down the hall, kindergartners wrote about their favorite desert animals, talked with a partner about where cacti grow, and chanted about biomes:
Arid deserts drying
Luscious forests growing
Polar caps freezing
Green prairies growing …
First graders discussed a story their teacher had read aloud in which a grandfather remembers courting his wife. In Common-Core style, they cited “clues” from the text of the grandfather’s feelings and learned words to describe emotions.
“How do you know he’s happy?” asked Heidi Conti, the teacher.
“He ‘winked’ at the boy,” answered a student.
“Good,” responded Conti. “You made an inference.”
Ninety-five percent of students at Redwood City’s Hoover School, in San Mateo County, come from low-income and working-class Latino families, and nearly all start school as English language learners (ELLs). The elementary and middle school piloted the Sobrato Early Academic Language (SEAL) program in 2009 in hopes of raising reading and math scores and moving more students to the college track.
Programs like SEAL offer a fresh approach to educating English language learners. The focus in schools is shifting “from the language of instruction to the quality of instruction,” says Kenji Hakuta, a Stanford professor who specializes in language learning. As a result, long-standing debates about whether English learners should be taught only in English or also in their native tongue feel increasingly obsolete.
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