Immersion Program Updates Elementary Updates Its our registration time of year! Please tell your friends and neighbors! It's time for rising 5 year old kindergartners to register for immersion in Lexington One! Please be sure to visit our registration page for more information! Parent information sessions will be held at Lexington One Central Services, 100 Tarrar Springs Road, Lexington, SC 29072 CLICK HERE FOR THE PARENT BROCHURE! CLICK HERE TO REACH MORE DETAILED INFORMATION ON DUAL LANGUAGE IMMERSION REGISTRATION! There will be 5 parent information sessions you may choose from to attend. All information presented will be the same at each one. FEBRUARY 23, 2018 AT 9:00 A.M. AND 1:00 P.M. FEBRUARY 26, 2018 AT 2:00 P.M. AND 6:30 P.M. MARCH 5, 2018 AT 10:00 A.M. DUAL LANGUAGE IMMERSION REGISTRATION WILL OPEN ONLINE ONLY ON MARCH 7, 2018 AT 4:00 P.M. Parents should go ahead and enroll their child for 5K at the school they are zoned for prior to registering for immersion. If your child is admitted into the program we will transfer your child's registration documents to the school he/she will attend in immersion. Secondary UpdatesMiddle School As we are entering the second half of the year, its important for our immersion parents of middle schoolers to really encourage your child to do their very best in their immersion language arts and passport classes. As your child's teacher has shared with you, our middle schoolers are very capable communicators in the language and they are beginning to earn high school credits based on their performance in the language starting in 6th grade with level 1, 7th grade with level 2 and 8th grade with level 3. Their final ratings will convert to numerical grades at the end of the year. The conversion scale can be found here. Many of our middle school immersion students are absolutely blowing us away with their language skills! It is amazing! These students are more than capable of performing quite well at these levels (as their language data shows coming out of 5th grade), unfortunately we are finding that some of our students are often not taking the classes very seriously and applying themselves because they believe it does not "count" for anything. Nothing could be further from the truth! This is a golden opportunity for them to learn and grow in the language and begin earning credits while in middle school. These classes DO count as part of their GPA at the end of the year and will be an important part of their middle school coursework as they prepare for high school. Please stress the importance of them applying themselves and paying attention in class so they can show what they really can do in the language and have a successful year! Our middle school teachers are willing and ready to assist them in order to ensure their success! High School Recently we held a parent information session for secondary immersion parents. We wanted to update everyone on plans for our rising juniors and seniors next year. As of right now, we are offering them the opportunity to take AP courses in French or Spanish in order to earn come college credits while we continue our planning with other possible universities and/or colleges who may be willing to offer dual credit for these students. Students also have the option to be part of the International Baccalaureate program at Lexington High School if that is of interest to them. It is important to note that the IB courses carry the same weight as the AP courses and the experience is a much more holistic experience. Please do consider this as an option for your child next year! There will be more information to come about scheduling etc... NOTE: We are also planning on how we will be recognizing the accomplishments of our immersion students, our first graduates of our program in the district! How exciting! Immersion Program HighlightsElementary At RBES, Fourth grade immersion teacher Sra. Amundaray, just wrapped up a unit in which students worked with food and supermarkets: converting measurement in the customary system, doing line graphs, pie charts and line plots and collecting data through surveys. They made presentations to their classmates about their findings and shared some of the recipes they worked with. Parents were completely involved. What a great way to incorporate math into the real world, while also expanding L2 vocabulary! Another notable accomplishment comes from Katrinda Scott at MES. Have you ever made a rubber band ball out of 100 rubber bands? Or possibly a fruit loop necklace with 100 fruit loops? PHES Spanish Immersion Kindergarten students celebrated the 100th day of school by presenting to parents in Spanish, projects they created in Srta. Hood's class. Their creative and fun projects were a great excuse to practice counting to 100 in Spanish! MGES Chinese immersion students and teachers presented an incredible showcase for Chinese New Year. The entire school came together, art, music, P.E. administration, teachers and parents to celebrate Chinese New Year in style. Kindergarten performed a play, 1st graders danced in full costume, second grade sang, third grade sang, fourth grade did a Kung Fu style dance, and fifth grade did a dragon dance honoring the animals from the zodiac. Tai chi was performed, and one student played the violin. It was a beautiful celebration of language and culture. Middle MGMS Chinese immersion students took a trip in December to the Confucius Institute at USC. Click here to check out the post on our WL blog. They also provided a wonderful learning opportunity in their building for all WL students about the celebration of the Chinese New Year. Here is a brief video of students in action at the celebration. At CSMS, eighth-grade Spanish immersion students recently tackled the Future Aspirations exploring different careers in which they can apply the World Language they have been learning for the last nine years. The students read 17 articles during these nine weeks about how to prepare to join the workforce. These items were read in the Target Language (Spanish) using the Program NewsELA; a website that rewrites news articles and other informational texts at five different reading levels to make it possible for students of all ages to read them. The students also watched some videos about careers from Discovery Education. When they had gathered enough information about the topic they were interested in, they created a video (in Spanish) trying to convince a friend to join the career with them. High LHS Year 1 immersion has extended our second unit of study, News, which focuses on accurately relating accounts in the past. Some of the activities to meet this goal have been: Research a local newspaper from one of the cities on their trip itinerary, and relate the news to classmates; watch a video of an unfortunate traveler, and write an account of what took place; tell a story of an unexpected event that took place during the trip to Spain. Students are showing much progress in terms of writing accuracy, and a beginning of integration of these concepts to verbal communication. WKHS Year 2 immersion is diving head first into the topic of community challenges from various countries around the Spanish-speaking world. We educated ourselves on the sudden loss and slow re-building of the power grid situation in Puerto Rico. And we are now looking at the government collapse of Venezuela and its effects on daily life. However, we have moved away from simply reading about an issue to now building a sense of empathy for those in these types of crisis and imagining how our lives here in the U.S. would be interrupted by such events. RBHS A group of French immersion students will have the unique opportunity to study abroad in Angers, France during the month of July for 3 weeks. Extra Inspiration Click here to read tips from Jacquelyn, a multilingual high school senior who is passionate about learning languages. This bright young lady speaks Mandarin, English, French and Korean! Did you know...?As the time nears for parents to determine what language to choose for their child in immersion, perhaps some of the information shared in this article will help you make up your mind. Fortunately for us in Lexington, we are able to provide many different options for our parents and students! Click on the link in the title to read the full article.
Local View: Being bilingual can bring business-world success By Melanie Haber on Feb 1, 2018 at 4:37 p.m. Excerpt: "Being bilingual is becoming a critical skill more employers are seeking. Having the ability to speak another language gives one a competitive edge against those who are monolingual, especially at companies with only monolingual employees. A survey conducted by the American Graduate School of International Management in Glendale, Ariz., found that a majority of students said that knowing another language was a crucial factor in getting hired. In 2010, there were 240,000 jobs that targeted bilingual workers. By 2015, there were 630,000 jobs. With such numbers on the rise, it is logical for one to conclude the need to learn a second language so they can succeed in the business world." Comments are closed.
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