SUMMER LEARNING

By WENDY SLEDD

Special to Leader-Press

Spanish, Italian, French, German, Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, Albanian, Serbian, Turkish, Bosnian and Romany. These are all languages toddlers in CCISD’s English as a Second Language class are speaking. The challenge is to teach the students English when the 4- and 5-year olds cannot understand what the teacher is saying or writing. Paula Hunter is one of a handful of teachers spending her summer teaching the Pre-K 4 year olds and kindergarten students command of the English language. “It’s a huge undertaking and it’s not what you would expect. It’s a lot of different languages,” Hunter said. So, how do the teachers work with the students to ensure they learn the English language? “We use a lot of pictures and do a lot of pointing and demonstrating, acting out the activity and having other kids who do have some understanding share with those students who do not,” Hunter said. CCISD Elementary Summer School Principal Julie Fish said 19 students are enrolled in the program this summer. “We are building up their background knowledge, basic reading skills and that type of thing,” she said. While traditional summer school is only four hours, the young ESL students spend a full six hours in the classroom as required by the Texas Education Agency. The six-week program covers letters, sounds, numbers, colors, shapes and how to write and say them. “We have worked a lot on listening comprehension and vocabulary,” Hunter said. “They knew sounds but did not know how to put those sounds together.” Hunter is a Pre-K teacher at Mae Stevens Early Learning Academy during the regular school year and said the ESL classes are very different. “It is very rewarding because of the smaller class sizes. We really get to work one-on-one with each student ensuring his success in grasping the language and understanding it,” said Hunter who is teaching ESL at this level for the second consecutive year. Some of the students she has taught now for two full years both at Mae Stevens and in the summer ESL program. “Their progress has been amazing. The two I had last year struggled with letters and this year, they are reading and it’s very exciting,” Hunter said. Fish said the student-to-teacher ratio is 10-1. When the students arrive, most do not interact but sit back and observe what is happening in the classroom. By the second year, they are very different students having become very social and beginning to read. “As an adult, I would be very intimidated coming into a classroom where I could not speak the language or understand what anyone was saying, but these kids are amazing. They easily pick up the language,” Hunter said. “We have had so much fun this summer.” More than 22 percent of students in Texas Public Schools require language classes to learn to speak English according to the Institute of Education Sciences.