RSS flexes with FLES
February 14, 2024 at 11:42 p.m.
The rotating plastic wheels carrying Jasminne Paulino’s cart—a pink and black crate filled with toys, puppets and large, laminated flashcards—made a distinct echo in the Ridge Street School corridors as they bounced down steps and hastily glided over the tiles.
She moved quickly, with purpose, rolling her way to Kristie Fon’s classroom on Monday, Jan. 29, because with only 20 minutes to work with, time is always of the essence. Not a minute can be wasted, and it rarely ever is.
The eyes of every present third-grader lit up as she entered the classroom, and uncontainable cheers spread in a chain reaction. It may have been because Paulino’s presence implied they were getting a break from the typical general education schedule, or perhaps it was enthusiasm over the content to come—they’ve found learning Spanish is fun.
“I’m a big clown,” Paulino laughed, justifying her students’ eager reaction. “I think foreign language teachers, for this age, have to be the ones that are the silliest and willing to go the extra mile to get kids really engaged in what you’re presenting.”
Blind Brook Schools, like many districts, for years started incorporating World Languages education into the curriculum in middle school, when students are in the sixth grade. However, a plethora of research suggests the earlier children start learning new languages the better, and innovative school districts have leaned into establishing such curricula earlier in their lives.
Paulino was hired at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year to kickstart Ridge Street Elementary School’s new Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) program, and she comes to the district with experience, having done the same at Hastings-on-Hudson Schools before taking a decade-long hiatus from teaching to raise her children. Starting the Spanish education program in Blind Brook was a priority so important to the administration that even as the district faced historically dire financial straits last year, which resulted in the adoption of the first tax-cap-breaking budget, plans to start the program were non-negotiable.
But what’s so great about FLES?
Filled with joy to be one of the last ones standing, Lennon Rieger’s face says it all as he has fun playing a counting game where the third graders chant: “uno, dos, tres, pantalones!”By Sarah Wolpoff
“I love it because any type of opportunity we can have for our children to learn about language and culture is amazing,” said Ridge Street School Principal Tracy Taylor. “But what I really love is how much the kids love it. They’re so excited to learn, and they’re excited to try out words, and they’re trying to talk to one another using these new things. You can hear it in the hallways.”
It takes little explanation to understand why fluency in a second language is beneficial for students. Not only does the study improve other brain functions, such as analytical skills and memory, but proficiency will give graduates a competitive edge as they enter college and career sectors.
And it’s easier to pick up those language acquisition skills at a younger age.
“The inhibition you tend to see in older kids just isn’t there,” Paulino said. “The readiness to just try something new, to sing a song, grab a puppet and have some sort of dialog with a friend, that’s there at a younger age.”
“Because they’re so young, and it’s being presented to them in a way where it’s games and songs and interactive and there’s a consistency to it, they’re really catching it,” she later added. “They can do it without overthinking it. I think that overthinking piece is what happens when a language is introduced later versus when they’re younger.”
Then versus now
Notably, FLES has been a desired addition to the elementary school’s education for years. Talks about teaching Spanish had essentially been ongoing since the previously established program was cut around a decade ago, according to Taylor.
“The way we had it, it just didn’t work well,” she explained, before speaking to a long, checkered history Blind Brook Schools has with the premise.
The district first started teaching Spanish to elementary schoolers in 1999 as a pilot program and saw various iterations of the model for years after—fluctuations often related to the balance of budgetary restrictions and figuring out best practice.
Initially, the program involved one teacher pushing into kindergarten and first-grade classrooms once a week for 30-minute sessions. And over the years, more grades were included as the educators played around with the number of visits and length of lectures, with many classrooms incorporating 40-minute Spanish segments. The district eventually, in 2006, hired a second teacher to increase exposure, but in 2012 that position was cut during a tough budget season.
“But we were realizing, in our internal data, when children went to the middle school after receiving one 40-minute period, they were pretty much starting at the same level as someone who never took Spanish before. So, we might have been immersing them, but they weren’t retaining the Spanish and continuing the momentum of learning,” Taylor said. “It became really hard to continue with a program that wasn’t working, and a decision needed to be made about if we should continue it, or table it and revisit.”
The district went with the latter, putting Spanish education on hold.
But the decision wasn’t all bad for Ridge Street School. At the time, Taylor said removing FLES from the curriculum gave the school flexibility to incorporate STEAM—since evolved and rebranded as the Young Engineers program—which Taylor said was revolutionary, as most districts during that era only offered such programing as an afterschool activity, not incorporated during the school day.
Still, however, there was always strong desire from the community to bring the Spanish program back.
“When we took it off the table, parents were upset,” Taylor said. “But I promised we’d bring it back, as long as we could in the true spirit of what FLES is supposed to look like.”
And this year, finally, the Blind Brook School District feels like they’ve successfully captured that essence.
Hola to new beginnings
Paulino developed a program that’s regularly pushing into the classrooms of all third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. Seeing them in 20-minute increments three times in every six-day schedule cycle, she’s created a routine that ensures students get two or three visits a week. When she has time, she’ll also stop by to see younger grades for occasional Spanish read aloud stories.
The 20-minute timeframe is “wonderful, it’s ideal,” she said, but it also means her visits, in nature, are fast-paced and energetic.
“It all needs to happen very quickly. I come in, ask them questions, we have movement activities. Because it’s about attention spans, too. With kids, for language learning specifically, there’s a 20- to 30-minute window where you have them and can get the most out of time with them,” she said. “Every single day would be ideal, but the way school schedules work, it just isn’t practical. But the way we have it, two or three times a week, it gives them enough consistency to absorb the language and make connections.”
In a regular engagement tactic Jasminne Paulino employs in the classroom, third-grader Taylor Cirillo uses a puppet sloth to have a Spanish-driven conversation with a classmate.By Sarah Wolpoff
Making those connections and designing a lesson that’s fun, she said, are the keys to a successful FLES program. Students feel engaged when they’re learning how to describe their favorite activities, friends’ characteristics or the clothes they’re wearing.
“If you’re not making it meaningful for them, giving them language they can use both inside and outside of the classroom, language they want to use with their friends when they’re on a playdate, then what really are we doing?” she said.
Day-to-day, Paulino’s classroom drop ins involve games, activities and lots of laughter. The idea is to create opportunities that students want to join in, because participating is playing—forcing them to be engaged if they want to be part of the fun.
The lessons are designed to be about conversational communication and comprehension. The elementary schoolers aren’t learning about spelling or verb conjugations, but as Taylor said: “It’s exposure. Grammar is not the forefront, but they’re learning it indirectly.”
“When you talk to people who have taken up another language, what they always mention is that conversation class that they took that was way more fun than the grammar,” Paulino said. “So, I’m trying to bring that fun conversation class folks would have in college to an elementary school level.”
Retention outside of the classroom is all about engagement inside the classroom, she said, and it seems to be working.
As Paulino walked the halls on Jan. 29, a child on a bathroom break approached—looking up with wide eyes and a bashful smile, she greeted the teacher in Spanish, asked about her day and questioned when she’d be visiting her class again.
Paulino described it as an interaction that’s common.
“I remember at the beginning they’d all be kind of looking at me like, this is happening really fast. But then, with time, they just caught on,” she said. “Now, you can hear them chanting our Spanish phrases on the bus, and they’ll tell me stories about understanding Spanish they overheard while walking on the street. That, for me, is a big win, to know that it’s not just when I’m in the classroom with them, but that when they step outside in the real world, they’re able to make their own meaningful connections.”
Developing FLES will be a multiyear process. Currently, students in all grades are essentially starting on the same foot, but of course, over the next few years she’ll be working to build a program that develops as children attain increasing exposure.
Soon, that program building will also involve collaboration with other educators across the district. Eventually, she’ll need to connect with the middle school Spanish teachers, because this will, ideally, change students’ level when they get to that point. But she’s also eager to connect more with fellow educators at Ridge Street School.
“It’s great when you can find content connections with what’s already being done inside the classroom. My goal is as we transition to Year 2 and Year 3, I’ll have more connection and understanding with the teachers. So they can get to know me, and I’ll get to know them, and we can look for areas within the curriculum where we can bridge the language learning with their content areas,” Paulino said. “When you have both, exposing kids to meaningful language they want to use and also tapping into what’s being done in the classroom, that’s a recipe for a program that will stick long term.”
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