Spanish program helps student progress

Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005

Click here to enlarge this photo Greg Dohler⁄The Gazette Janay Jackson (center), 6, and fellow pupils at the International Day School in Oxon Hill rehearse Mexican dances with Raices Mexicanas, a folkloric dance group of 30 teachers from Mexico visiting the school. The visitors have been teaching a variety of traditional Mexican dances.

A couple of doors down the hallway, pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students sang along in Spanish with their teacher after learning how to count money in English.

As the school’s 45 students prepared for their traditional folkloric dance performance with visiting teachers from Mexico, the head and founder of the school, Esther V. Donawa, said the children were able to learn through immersion and International Baccalaureate (IB) programs.

‘‘It is an academically accelerated program,” Donawa said, adding that the school’s six teachers alternate between classes of no more than 15 students each, with classes ranging from pre-kindergarten to fifth grade. ‘‘We want to make sure the kids get individual attention. We don’t want anyone to get left behind.”

Donawa said most students’ parents speak English as a primary language, with students being taught various subjects in English three days per week and then studying the same subjects in Spanish from another teacher the other two days

‘‘We work together, and we have the same books,” said Monica Ambrosino, who teaches first- and second-graders in English. Born in England, and raised in Italy, Ambrosino also teaches French to some students and said the shared duties between teachers and mixed grade-level classrooms are helpful to the learning process.

‘‘We know exactly what their weaknesses are and what their strengths are,” she said. ‘‘The kids get used to [the languages] quite quickly.”

ToMeka Nunn of Fort Washington, who has a son in kindergarten at the school, said she speaks Spanish and has lived in different countries and wanted her son to have experiences with people from diverse backgrounds.

‘‘I think it’s very important to let [children] know that you’re not the only people in your world,” she said, noting that many students in her son’s classes are black Americans and learn about different cultures from the international faculty. ‘‘You have to find a place that’s going to provide a good, solid foundation for your child.”

Nunn said she chose the international school over other public and private schools because she can be involved with teachers and the board of directors and her son is making academic strides. ‘‘I feel that he’s made a miraculous change from last year,” she said. ‘‘He’s just tripled in what he knows.”

Donawa, who also lives in Fort Washington, said her two children originally went to school on Capitol Hill before she founded the international school after basing the concept on a similar school in the District. She said she was thinking of sending her first child to that school, but with the tuition exceeding $20,000, Donawa said she thought the money could be better spent on a neighborhood program that could serve her children and others. The international school opened in 2001.

María Paz, who taught in Chile for 10 years before teaching pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children in Spanish at the Oxon Hill school, said students are able to learn by singing in Spanish.

‘‘It helps them pronounce, it helps the memory,” she said in Spanish, adding that children sing every day and repeat words on various themes. ‘‘It helps them learn to read.”

Donawa’s daughter, Samantha, 9, who is now a fourth-grader at the school, spoke about her experiences with the immersion program in Spanish, as Donawa, who primarily speaks English, looked on. ‘‘It’s fun,” Samantha said of her classes. ‘‘We do things together.”

Samantha said her ability to speak Spanish was important to her mother, who responded with a smile. ‘‘That’s what makes this all worthwhile. When you see a child at nine [years old] communicating like that in both languages,” Donawa said. ‘‘They don’t understand yet, how important it is.”

E-mail Leslie Quander Wooldridge at lwooldridge@gazette.net.