No FLES...what is added instead?

[Anonymous]

At our school, the librarian sees every class every week for at least 30 minutes and sometimes for 60 minutes depending on the grade. (And I'm livid in her behalf because she has no aide and being on the master all day leaver her no time to actually be a librarian and take care of all the books. All the other subjects have 2 teachers and share the load.) We also have 2 staff who teach a STEAM special, our SBTS and another "coach" which is an extra coach paid for by our principal who spends 70% of her time in CLT's and doing admin work. At a former school, we also had the AART teaching a critical thinking an creativity lab once a week for some grades, and a half time teacher who taught all the Health lessons for lower grades with a weekly special. Teachers LOVED this because it freed up instructional time for science and social studies. I also had another principal who trotted an extra weekly special among the librarian, SBTS, reading teacher, and AART, so they basically decided among themselves who would do the extra hour for each grade every 4 weeks. That worked really well because they could flex their time...like, the SBTS would do Hour of Code in December, the AART would use it for extra lessons for 2nd grade before AAP screening, it could be used for Book Fair preview during those times, and the staff flexed around things that came up like needing to be out of the building for meetings or if one of them was the testing coordinator.

[Anonymous]

My son loved the STEAM class taught by the SBTS some years, and I the years he got an extra 30 mins of library which he also loved. Our school does not have FLES though I think he'd like that too. Basically, he loves all breaks from the regular classroom!

[Anonymous]

I went to elementary school in Germany (a Germans school, not American military)and we had English every single day starting in Kindergarten. If the US wants to stay ahead in the world, they should start their children learning foreign language at an early age. It's much easier to learn if they are learning consistently (every day) at early ages.

Anyway to answer OP's question, my children moved from a school that structured specials so kids had Spanish twice a week and Music/PE on the same day to a school where the kids do not have a language and instead have one special every day (Music 2x, PE 2x, Art 1x and then occasional STEAM lab, counseling, and library). The old school did not have STEAM lab.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I went to elementary school in Germany (a Germans school, not American military)and we had English every single day starting in Kindergarten. If the US wants to stay ahead in the world, they should start their children learning foreign language at an early age. It's much easier to learn if they are learning consistently (every day) at early ages.

Anyway to answer OP's question, my children moved from a school that structured specials so kids had Spanish twice a week and Music/PE on the same day to a school where the kids do not have a language and instead have one special every day (Music 2x, PE 2x, Art 1x and then occasional STEAM lab, counseling, and library). The old school did not have STEAM lab.

I’ve been in public education for decades and I can tell you with 100% certainty that the US government has no interest in keeping the US education system ahead. Colleges and universities may, but not the government who oversees K-12 education.

[Anonymous]

My kids have Chinese FLES and hate it. No Chinese in our middle school, our pyramid high school has Chinese in the Academy. The do like the Culture stuff like Chinese New Year lessons, but struggle with the language. My kids wish it was Spanish. I'd love weekly library time as they have no set library time after 3rd grade in our school. We do have Steam but each grade goes for a full week once a quarter, I think it pulls out of science/social studies time. Extra Art would be the bomb for my kids.

[Anonymous]

Word to the wise - if you have little kids start lobbying your PRA and principal now to drop FLES. By the time I really realized what a stupid waste it was we only had a couple years left so why bother. But if you have a little kid you could have time to try to get your school to pick a more worthwhile special.

[Anonymous]

^
PTA

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Word to the wise - if you have little kids start lobbying your PRA and principal now to drop FLES. By the time I really realized what a stupid waste it was we only had a couple years left so why bother. But if you have a little kid you could have time to try to get your school to pick a more worthwhile special.

Mine are 6th and 4th so probably wouldn't happen in time. I never thought I could lobby to get it changed, I thought FCPS required FLES.

[Anonymous]

FLES is not at every ES in FCPS. Most of the families I know who have kids at a school with FLES think it is a waste of time. The Teacher has to start over every year because new kids move into the school. There is no real benefit to an hour a week of language instruction with no homework and no reinforcement in the classroom.

Families who are interested in their child learning a language should look at the language immersion programs which have consistent exposure to the language. Even then, most of the kids are no where near fluent in the language. The ES do not focus on grammar and the like. DS participated in Japanese through LI and enjoyed the program. He learned more than he thinks he did but was not in a place where he felt comfortable having anything but a very basic conversations. I wonder if the kids in Spanish, French, or German LI programs are more comfortable then the kids in Japanese and Korean.

He is doing a lot more in Japanese in MS, which I suspect is moving faster then a normal first year class because the students were familiar with the alphabets and what the language should sound and look like. The MS Immersion classes are where the kids start to learn the formal grammar and vocabulary and the like. I did laugh this weekend as one of the kids who speaks Japanese said that if anyone spoke the way they are learning right now they would be seen as a tool in Japan.

[Anonymous]

FLES is fine. It’s not cumulative really - the kids don’t learn that much more each year, but they should come away with some basics (colors, greetings). They also learn random stuff that they’ll never remember (e.g., the butterfly life cycle in Spanish bc that’s what they are learning in science).

It might give them a little advantage in the first couple of units of Spanish I (or whatever), but not all students will take the same language they took in FLES, and most don’t take a language until 8th grade so may not remember much.

All in all, I wouldn’t worry. We moved in FCPS, and my younger no longer has FLES. New school has AART as a special. Not sure exactly what they do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I went to elementary school in Germany (a Germans school, not American military)and we had English every single day starting in Kindergarten. If the US wants to stay ahead in the world, they should start their children learning foreign language at an early age. It's much easier to learn if they are learning consistently (every day) at early ages.

... but why? As someone well-traveled, interested in languages, who sent kids to an immersion school, and is a non-native English speaker to boot: most of the people you come in contact with abroad speak English, unless you are well off the beaten path, and if you are well off the beaten path, the chances of you having learnt the specific language of that well-off-the-beaten-path place is minimal (I had difficulty in Hungary communicating with someone who really didn't speak English. Not having had learned Hungarian in FLES, I tried German. That did not help.)

That's not even getting into auto-translation, which is just staggeringly good now for even relatively minor foreign languages into English. I can watch Danish TV with auto-translated captions and I can understand nearly all of what's going on, outside of a few cultural references. It takes years to hit that level.