nada, nada, limonada
I speak a little Spanish. I speak enough to get me by, and I really like the fact that I can communicate with my students and parents that speak Spanish. I understand Spanish speaking children and their parents wanting to learn English. And the best part is… its possible to speak more than one language! It is totally possible for kids to speak one language at home, and then to use another mainly at school. I think that they can not only do it, but they are smarter for it. Goooooo bilingual!
The video was cool, it was kind of like seeing theory in practice. I like how they stressed honoring home language. I’m probably going to say something a little unpopular, but I DEFINITLEY agree with honoring home language. I’d like to think that we are honoring school language too, in all types. I’m all about the balance, y’all.
The book is great about giving real examples of how to implement practice, so I toast to you, Barone, Mallette and Xu, for your wonderful graphs, lists, examples, and research. It really stood out to me when the authors pointed out that in English we use so many different sentence structures, an ELL student would have a hard time extracting the meaning from these sentences. Share time was always hard for my ELL students, and I liked the ideas that BMX (my acronym for Barone, Mallette, and Xu) put forth about encouraging participation.
sirsand said,
March 31, 2009 @ 5:18 pm
Hey April – I was so glad to see you giving support to honoring the home language – I completely agree with you and I think that the research on how children learn agrees with you too. I second that GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO binlingual!
I really liked seeing the real classroom segments in the video too – I notice that they all stressed honoring the home culture and language – it seems that this just makes things richer for ALL of the children.