Walla Walla schools use song to teach language

Blue Ridge students learning English get a leg up on pronunciation through the lyrics.

WALLA WALLA -- Tina Brennan got her students ready for a lesson by having them stand up and gather their hands to simulate a crawling spider, and turning some music on.

"We are going to start with 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider,'" Brennan told the group of kindergarten students at Blue Ridge Elementary. "Show me your itsy!" she said, as she looked to make sure all the children were shaping their mouths in the right way to pronounce that first vowel sound made by the letter "I."

Familiar nursery rhymes and other childhood songs have taken on special significance inside kindergarten classrooms in Walla Walla Public Schools. Meant to help children who primarily speak Spanish at home, the songs reinforce sounds in English that are especially hard for learners to pronounce.

Brennan, who handles English instruction for the kindergarten dual-language program at Blue Ridge, was part of a committee last year that looked at what English language learners were struggling with.

By studying the data of second-graders who had grown up primarily speaking Spanish in the home, teachers were able to identify about 20 sounds students might struggle articulating.

In the dual-language model, children who speak Spanish primarily at home learn beside classmates who are native English speakers. Together, the students learn both English and Spanish throughout elementary school. But English speakers learn to read and write in English first, while Spanish speakers learn reading and writing in Spanish initially. In second grade, students in the program begin to learn reading and writing in the other language.


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