This year, 4th and 5th-grade teachers have taken great strides to ensure Bilingual and Biliteracy, and multicultural competency for our Dual Language Learners. There is a growing commitment at Heyer, Banting, Bethesda, and Hawthorne that bilingualism and biliteracy means “both” Spanish and English in these grades across content areas.
We know that our program aligns as closely as possible with the research-based outcomes for Dual Language ONLY when we can ensure at least 50% and not less of the instructional day is offered in the partner, minority language-in this case Spanish. We know, and can confirm from our SDW data, that when we do not offer at least 50:50, our student’s math achievement and their bilingualism dwindles. Teachers are now teaching math in the language of instruction that is the opposite of CLM.
This means that when teaching ciencias, we are also teaching matemáticas.
Let’s celebrate some of the artifacts from this Trimester One!
- WE know that some of the materials available have English Labels. This is OKAY! See the sample here. What would you need to do to ensure students both know how to play the game to interact with the math, and use their minoritized language for social/learning purposes?
