Greetings! Welcome to the world of Dual Immersion, Sunnyslope style.
The purpose of this blog is to share our experiences with Dual Immersion with the hopes of enriching, enlightening and entertaining whomever comes across this trusty blog.
What exactly is Dual Immersion? Good question. I haven't taken a poll but I would imagine a fair number of parents who enrolled their children in Sunnyslope Elementary School's DI Program had the same question, and probably could not answer it quite the same way they could now. Now, we're not going to get too technical here. For the nuts-and-bolts of Dual Immersion, also known as Two-Way Immersion in some circles, that's best answered on formal educational Web sites such as this one.
In short, though, Dual Immersion is a special program in which students learn a second language, in our case Spanish. In kindergarten, 90 percent of the day is spent learning in Spanish and 10 percent of it in English and with each passing grade the students learn more in English until by 4th grade it's at 50/50.
Aside from the language itself, what goes on in the DI classes also goes on in the rest of the school. In other words, the same standards that non-DI teachers are teaching are also being taught in DI classes. First and foremost, the standards drive the instruction. The only difference is, DI classes sound different. And the students learn two languages for the price of one.
Anyway, throughout this blog we will bring you more information about our DI program - the 2010/11 school year brings sees our DI program increase to K-3, with eight DI classes. All relevant information about the DI program will hopefully be brought forth here in one way or another, through first-person entries, videos, audio, and whatever methods are most effective.
Mostly though we just hope to provide a glimpse into the world of Dual Immersion, both at Sunnyslope and wherever DI programs exist.
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