Our daughter will go to kindergarten next year. We just found out that

[driver8]

she will be able to attend a "spanish immersion" elementary school that we were on the waiting list for.

At this school, 90% of the day is taught in Spanish...their Kindergarten teacher never speaks English to them. The class will be made up of Spanish and non-Spanish speakers. The Spanish immersion program continues through to the fifth grade. My daughter will be fluent in Spanish by third grade.

This is cool for my wife and I because we want to also learn Spanish!!

[KitchenWitch]

1. That is fantastic!

I want to re-learn Spanish also (took two years of it in high school - I only know two sentences - Uno mas cerveza por favor. AND Donde esta el bano? (banyo - I do not know the keyboard shortcut for the tilde).

[driver8]

2. It's pretty cool -- my wife and I visited the school.

I was very impressed. It was awesome to see these kids from no-Spanish speaking homes speaking fluent Spanish. The teachers at this school are amazing!

[Reverend_Smitty]

3. bebe mucho cerveza y tu necesitas ir al bano

:P so those are good phrases to know

[KitchenWitch]

4. Si, si, senorita!

:)

[skygazer]

17. What else could you possibly need to know?

:shrug:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. As a former language teacher, I believe that this is a good idea IF

the class consists of a good percentage of both native English speakers and native Spanish speakers. If all or most of the kids are native English speakers, they will develop a "classroom dialect," their own improvised variety of Spanish that isn't like the speech of any native speaker anywhere. If there are enough native speakers of Spanish in the class, they'll help the teacher model genuine Spanish usage.

I've seen the results of trying to immerse an entirely English-speaking class in Japanese without including any Japanese-speaking students and with teachers whose own Japanese isn't so great. By eighth or ninth grade, those kids are speaking on about the same level as someone who has had two years of college Japanese, which is to say with simple sentence structure and lots of errors. Their pronunciation is better than that of most college students, and their comprehension isn't bad (although it's not spectacular), but when they try to speak, it's painful to listen to.

In the old days before bilingual education, you used to get situations in which a class made up entirely of native speakers of Spanish, Chinese, or Navaho was forced to take all its classes in English from day one, with the children punished for speaking their home language. The result was often people who spoke poor English and childish Spanish/Chinese/Navaho.

Children can pick up languages almost out of the air, but they need to hear native speakers and ideally, to associate one language with home and another with school, with strict separation maintained between the two. "At home we speak English, but at school and with your classmates you speak Spanish." That sort of thing.

Children in Spanish immersion classes have an advantage over children in Japanese immersion classes. There are plenty of certified teachers who are native speakers of Spanish, there are plenty of native speakers in most communities, there's a lot of media available (two TV stations on the Minneapolis cable system), and Spanish-speaking countries are close at hand.

[driver8]

8. We live in the Los Angeles area...

our daughter will get lots of chances to practice her Spanish!

[grasswire]

12. my nephew's experience...

...in high school German has frustrated his mother and me. He's being taught a Bavarian dialect; the soft "sh" instead of the proper pronunciation of the "ch" sound. His teacher is an American who only has traveled in Bavaria and learned the language there. I'm very disappointed by it, having learned from German teachers who spent a lot of time on correct pronunciation of hoch Deutsch.

He doesn't see the problem. I told him it's as if someone learning English were taught an extremely localized American dialect.

Gah!

[northzax]

19. no worse than the parisian french everyone is taught

it's how it goes.

[driver8]

22. How true! My wife and I were visiting Montreal a few years ago and my wife

wanted to practice her French. We stopped at a bakery and my wife spoke to the woman behind the counter in "Parisian" French. The woman replied in some language that sounded like French, but my wife didn't understand what she said...plus, the woman spoke so fast!

It's like listening to someone from Cuba speak Spanish and someone from Mexico speak Spanish -- it sounds totally different.

[mzteris]

6. muy bueno

My son (8 yo) is finishing up 2nd grade in a Spanish immersion school.

He corrects my Spanish (which admittedly isn't that great!) - but it's kinda funny, ya know? His correcting MY grammar in Spanish! lol.....

A month or so ago, I took him to a Mexican restaurant for dinner. He started speaking with the waiter, ordered our dinner, carried on a conversation - part of which was - "my mom doesn't speak very good Spanish!" He and the waiter laughed and laughed. haha. When we went to leave, the waiter nearly chased me out the door to tell me how well my son spoke Spanish. Pretty cool.

[driver8]

9. Ha Ha -- that is a cute story.

I see that you are in Wisconsin...my wife grew up in Osh Kosh.

I find it interesting that there is a Spanish immersion program in Wisconsin. But hey --that is a good thing!!

[Zoigal]

7. All three of our grandkids

are fluent in Spanish. (One is fluent in Chinese as well.) Went to a school
where half the day was instructed in English, the other half, Spanish from
K through 12. Great experience for them. Their English is a bit accented, though.
Good luck to your little one.

[rockymountaindem]

10. I wish those kinds of things had been available for me when I was that age

Now I've got to bust my ass to learn new languages. As someone who's spent years working on French, let me give you some advice: everything you or your daughter lears will disappear unless you practice frequently. I don't mean while you're in the process of taking classes and studying, but afterwards when you consider yourself fluent or nearly so. If you don't practice, it'll go away more quickly than you can imagine.

[Heidi]

11. Lea will be able to swear in two languages!

:rofl: :spray:

[driver8]

13. Ha Ha -- sssshhhh...she doesn't need any ideas!!

:hi:

[Q3JR4]

14. That is so cool.

It almost makes me want to have children of my own so I could send them to a Spanish immersion school.

[Rambis]

15. We have a version of that

It is called dual language. 1/2 the day in english 1/2 in spanish and the kids are evenly split native speakers and english speakers. Our son loves it-
We were listening to a folkways album the other day on a long car trip and a spanish folk song came on and he sang every word. He sings to himself in spanish a lot and has started using Aye Carumba! He doesn't like to talk about what he learns in class but if you ask him what a word or phrase means he knows. He told us yesterday he feels like he is getting "browner" now that he can speak Spanish. This program goes k-12 so he will be fluent by about 4-5th grade and continue through high school if he wants to.

[Zoigal]

18. Wow, am impressed

Sounds a lot like the program our grandkids experienced.
Kudos to your son.

[Ellen Forradalom]

16. Fantastic!

You won't regret making her a citizen of the world.

[One_Life_To_Give]

20. How will that affect her English?

Nothing against learning another language. But wondering if her english will suffer from this?

[driver8]

21. Believe me -- she has no problems with English!!

She isn't even in Kindergarten and is reading on a third grade level. She is very precocious and very verbal.

That is one of the reasons that we are so happy that she got into this program.