Spanish Language Development in a Kindergarten Dual Immersion Classroom

We wanted to share a number of pictures with you from a Dual Immersion kindergarten classroom. The teacher had a number of Spanish learners (i.e., English-only students who are learning in Spanish) in the classroom and she used a variety of strategies to make the Spanish instruction comprehensible to her students.

She initially developed a conceptual understanding of “cats” in Spanish, bringing in a ribbon to describe that their fur can sometimes feel smooth. She also brought in realia in the form of cat food to demonstrate what cats eat and she also sketched a variety of pictures about cats. If you look closely, you will see the ribbon and the cat food on the chart below.

After she was able to activate students’ prior knowledge about cats and her students’ background knowledge, she created a chart where she drew a pictorial of a cat, labeling the parts of the cat’s body. She also included important information around the pictorial, such as “where cats live”, “what cats eat”, “what cats are like”, and “activities of cats”:

On another day the students completed an interactive writing piece about cats, with different students using the pictorial chart to write sentences and words about the cats:

Finally, when the teacher was able to build sufficient understanding, vocabulary and language structures required to talk about cats, she then had students write about the cats in their journals. The following writing sample is from a native English-speaking Spanish learner who wrote about cats. Although the meaning of the writing is clear, you will notice (if you are familiar with Spanish) that the student demonstrates inconsistent use of subject/verb agreement and verb conjugation in Spanish–something that is typical of native English-speaking Spanish learners at the beginning stages of Spanish language development:

Do you have a picture of a strategy or your room environment that you would like to share with other bilingual teachers and/or parents who are interested in bilingual education? Please email it to multilingualmania(at)yahoo(dot)com and we would love to feature your pictures!
Using glad strategies in Spanish in a bilingual classroom. A variation of the pictorial input chart in Spanish. SLD strategies for EO students