Blog 10: Cloud Forest School observation 6/04/13

My visit to the Cloud Forest School showed me that there are similarities between the tico culture and my own but at the same time there are differences and the Cloud Forest School is one of them. In the United States we do not have a certain school that is solely dedicated to teaching children from preschool all the way to high school in another language (that I know of). In the United States we have elementary, secondary, and high schools that have class for students to learn Spanish and they are usually an hour or less each day or once a week. Our culture is not as passionate as the tico culture to have our children learn to speak another language fluently. At the Cloud Forest School the children are taught English in every class starting in preschool and there is one class for Spanish. I think this is wonderful because these students are so fluent in English by the time they graduate high school along with their own language. I was surprised by the fact that the students start so young, but I guess it makes sense because the younger they start learning the more they will retain and learn. If there was a school that only taught in Spanish and then had one English class a day I would want to send my children there because they would be bilingual by the time they entered college, and if they needed more work with anything in English I could also help teach them!

As a future teacher I want to incorporate other languages in my classroom and it does not have to be just Spanish. As I was walking touring the Cloud Forest School I was thinking of ways I could do this and I came up with the idea of having posters in my classroom on how to to say “may I use the restroom, thank you, you are welcome, have a great day, or how are you” in different languages on the walls of my classroom so my students can use another language more often than just in the hour or so Spanish class. Being here in Costa Rica has made me realize that if someone does not constantly use what they learn, especially when learning another language, then they will not remember it as much as they would if they were applying what they used all the time.