001Welcome to Madison Heights. My name is Priscilla Gossett and I'm the proud principal of Madison Heights Elementary School. This is my 12th year here at Heights and my 16th year in the district, and I welcome you in to our school and to our amazing district. I'm here to tell you about two of our signature programs here at Heights. The first one is the Spanish immersion program. A couple of expectations in our Spanish immersion program and what our program is all about is that we're here to produce bilingual students and bilingual citizens. In our program, our students are going to be learning in Spanish. And when our students are learning in Spanish, they are learning the subjects of science, social studies and language arts, all in Spanish. And then in English, our students are learning, reading,
002writing and math. And so since we separate our contents into language learning, the students will have two teachers, one for the English instruction and one for the Spanish instruction. We want our students to take risks in their new language that they're learning. And so we're going to encourage them once we've taught them some academic vocabulary and Spanish phrases, words, sentences, that they're going to be using and applying their Spanish in every setting around campus. We are having kids speak at the sentence level instead of just the word level. We know when students can respond and think and answer in complete sentences that they're using more of their language and really understanding what they're saying and taking that risk and using their language in a complete way. Hi, my name is Maria Torres and I'm a
003kindergarten Spanish teacher here at Madison Heights. And this is my 17th year of teaching kindergarten. In kindergarten, it's very important to start the program because this is where we lay the foundations for our program. And we do that through our content area that we do science, social studies, and we're teaching them all in Spanish. So we're not teaching them Spanish. We're teaching them *in* Spanish. In kindergarten, we do a lot of activities and conversations that allow the students to show language and social skills. So pretty much the whole time that they're in the Spanish class, they're listening to it, first of all, in Spanish, all the content, all the speaking, all the listening, everything they watch, everything they hear, it's in Spanish. And then also is we use a lot of TPR. So again, you
004know, like "levantate" like stand up, "ponte línea", so we use a lot of TPR. We also use a lot of videos. We use a lot of pictures and we do a lot of modeling. So that's one of the ways that students are acquiring the Spanish because they see it, they hear it. And then usually the last step in our program is speaking it. So usually in kindergarten, you might not hear the students speak a lot just because they're taking it all in and they're listening to it and they're acquiring all the Spanish that I'm speaking. What I most enjoy about the program is just having like the freedom to be able to teach a second language, you know, with, you know, hands on hands on just bringing in real life experiences into our classrooms. Our
005second signature program here is the REACH program, which is for highly and profoundly gifted students in grades one through four. What we say here at Heights is that you're a Madison Heights student first, then you're either in the Spanish immersion program or you're in the REACH program. And so for REACH, as I said before, grades one, two, three and four. And for those students, this is an excellent program because it provides an opportunity for students to work at their level so that we can meet their academic needs while they get a chance to socialize with age appropriate peers and be able to work together and meet their learning needs, as I said. Those are just a quick synopsis of the two programs that we have. I'm really proud to be here at Heights. We're a
006family here at Heights and we'd like to welcome you in. If you want some more information, catch me at the Discover Madison tour or call the school to schedule a virtual tour, I'd be happy to speak to you and to show you and give you more information about our wonderful and amazing community. Thanks for your time.