Mung Thai read aloud in Cantonese as he sat next to his son Nick in Jennifer Burkey’s second-grade class Friday morning.
The 18 students sitting cross-legged on a patch of carpeting were already aware of the plot to ‘Li’s Chinese New Year.’They heard it read to them in English the week before, but this time students listened as it was read in Cantonese. The colorful picture book was written in Chinese. The story shares the traditions of the Chinese New Year celebration, from the parade, red envelopes and the animals of the zodiac, which will be celebrated Saturday.
When it was time to ask questions, students shifted to sit on their knees, hands shot into the air as Mung answered questions, students rocked off their feet, hands inching higher into the air to be called on — “How do you read [the characters];” “Is every symbol a word?;” “When you have Chinese New Year, what do you eat?;” “Where did you learn your language?”
Thai replied: “From left to right;” “Yes;” “We eat chicken, rooster, pork;” “in Vietnam.”
Though Thai speaks Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin and English, he spoke in his native Cantonese during the read-aloud program. He also read aloud to his daughter, Haidee’s, class Friday morning.
Mung showed students photos of a rooster — this is the Year of the Rooster — and customary dishes shared during the New Year Celebration and how to say the dishes in Cantonese. Nick, 7, showed his fellow students a hand-puppet-sized red dragon, a miniature version of dragons seen during Chinese New Year parades.
Now seated at their desks, white boards and markers in front of them, students waited as Thai wrote the words for “rooster,” “Happy New Year” and “father,” along with the numbers 1-10, in Chinese on the board, then said them aloud for students, who repeated each phrase: “gai (rooster),” “sun-li-fi-la (Happy New Year),” and “bah bah” (father).
Students looked up at the board at the front of the classroom, back at their white board, up at the board, back at theirs, making sure what they saw matched what they wrote in front of them.
Thai is one of five parents who have come into Webster Hill Elementary School this year to read aloud in their native language. Last year, 17 people – parents, grandparents, the school’s custodian and a teacher – spoke to students in their native language – Somali, Farsi, Japanese, French and Portuguese, among others, English as a Second Language teacher Darci Melchor said.
“Farsi was a big one,” Melchor said. “The mom, in addition to reading in Farsi, talked about the importance of Muslim women wearing a hijab.”
The idea to bring parents into the classroom and share their native language and culture started as a conversation between Melchor, fellow ESOL teacher Jeff Bette and Webster Hill principal Jeffrey Wallowitz. Webster Hill, this year, includes students who speak 22 different languages, Melchor said, and this program is a way to embrace that.
“We send a clear message that we value [native languages] and we ask you to come in and share that with the school,” Wallowitz said. “We want families to read to their children in their native languages as much as they can and it’s just a way to celebrate that and say, ‘Hey, it’s important to still maintain your culture and maintain your language,’ and by doing this we highlight it, we celebrate it and we value it.”
For Thai, Friday was “very exciting for me, I have never been a teacher but look, I am a teacher today.”
Thai said he has lived in West Hartford for the last 20 years, and that he and his wife make a point to speak Cantonese when their children are home.
Melchor and Bette launched the 2015-16 school year with a multicultural table set up at open house night. They sent home flyers to parents, asking them to come in and read – “The response was overwhelming, parents really wanted to come in and read.”
The week before a parent comes into the classroom, the teacher will read aloud the book they will hear in a different language the following week, show a map of the country the family member is from and talk a little bit about the country.
In addition to read-alouds in a family member’s native language, students begin a day taking over the morning announcements, greeting their students in a different language.
“We want them to cherish the cultural and linguistic diversity that we have here at Webster Hill,” Melchor said. “We think it’s one of our strengths and we think by bringing parents and family members in, they can learn things that we can’t teach them with our curriculum or a book or a video.”
It also gives students who come from bilingual backgrounds the chance “to shine,” Melchor said. “It puts them in a position of expertise that sometimes they don’t feel.”
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