"Mi Visita" to Lindley Elementary

“Cuatro más uno es igual a cinco." If you don’t know Spanish, you may not know what that means.  But if you don’t know Spanish and you go to Lindley Elementay School, you will have no problem discovering what those words mean.  In Lindley’s Spanish immersion program, students not only hear Spanish; they see it and do it and become it.  Yesterday I observed Lindley’s teachers explaining math concepts in Spanish, some with a very young audience, some with older students and more advance concepts. But every student understood the lesson as it was taught in the Spanish language. That’s because the teachers spoke the language, they used manipulatives to teach the concepts, and they engaged the students in active learning. 

Being a former foreign language teacher, I have always loved the idea of Lindley’s Spanish immersion program but had never observed it.  The use of the written language in both English and Spanish is consistently displayed throughout the building and lets young learners distignuish between the two languages. I appreciated the use of Total Physical Repsonse, a foreign language method I learned during my student teaching. It was widely used by teachers as well as many other foreign language teacher methods.  It’s no wonder all students actively participated and were engaged in their lessons. Young minds can absorb so much – and this is exactly what these amazing young minds were doing during my visit to Lindley Elementary.