Yesterday, during an activity with one of my Kindergarten classes, a student who had been asked to identify what animal I was holding up (a picture of a cat), thought for a moment then looked up at one of my bulletin boards where I had posted pictures of family vocabulary along with large labels for each word and said 'un gato'.
I am a strong advocate for presenting all vocabulary in written form along with the oral language. Even the youngest students will begin to build a visual memory of those words, and connections are built in the brain between the written and spoken language. This student already has literacy skills- she is already reading at an early emergent level. Regardless of whether a student has a set of literacy skills or not, however, the written word is an important piece of scaffolding and providing support for our students. In addition, students are encouraged to transfer the skills they have learned with the gen ed teacher to the Spanish classroom- another connection.
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