Preparing for Oyster/language immersion school

[Anonymous]

Our son will be starting Oyster next fall (2009) in kindergarten. We are staying at our wonderful preschool for the prek year, but (today being the cut off for inboundary prek selection) I am starting to worry that he'll be at a disadvantage with 1 less year of Spanish than the kids starting prek this fall.

Does anyone have any recs on how to prepare him for kindergarten? Classes? Books?

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

perhaps a nice relaxing trip to mexico where he can hear spanish... and you can see the lovely beaches

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our son will be starting Oyster next fall (2009) in kindergarten. We are staying at our wonderful preschool for the prek year, but (today being the cut off for inboundary prek selection) I am starting to worry that he'll be at a disadvantage with 1 less year of Spanish than the kids starting prek this fall.

Does anyone have any recs on how to prepare him for kindergarten? Classes? Books?

Thanks!

Good for you for looking into it early! Rest assured that research - and Oyster results - say he'll be fine at that age.

Have you read "The Bilingual Edge"? Great for parents/families who are - or are interested in being - bilingual. It's very practical and helps parents figure out for themselves how to approach bilingualism based on measurable things like language support, schools, activities, etc. Even my bilingual DH found the book helpful in challenging some assumptions he had that I followed which resulted in a lot more work for both of us. Glad we read this before school.

Some of it is pretty obvious, but it has lots of resources and was written by linguists/mothers at GU, so they know DC! They're not big on "edutainment" DVDs and such. Which makes sense - you can't learn Spanish from watching Dora.

As for classes, got great feedback on Communikids.

Hope this helps.
Bienvenidos al mundo bilingue

[Anonymous]

I wouldn't worry that much. If you want to start exposing him to Spanish, consider sending him to day camp in Spanish -- the Washington Int'l School runs a good one. It will provide your son with a much better exposure to the language than one hour a week classes at CommuniKids (which nevertheless are quite good from what I've heard).

You can take him to bilingual or Spanish only plays at the GALA Theatre or Teatro de la Luna. The DC area has a lot of good resources. There is also a great bilingual families listserv for DC area (mostly Northern Virginia) Spanish-English bilingual families called Amigas Vecinas.

Your son won't be behind. In Arlingon, where immersion starts in kindergarten, even first graders with no prior Spanish can transfer in.