Hellobee Boards

The elementary school in my neighborhood has a Spanish immersion program that I would love to put my kids in.

It would. It's important to me that she sees cultural/racial diversity on a regular basis.

There's a Spanish immersion and French immersion pre-school/day care in my area. Nothing beyond that pre-school though. We are looking into the Spanish immersion program since DH speaks Spanish. It's mostly white kids (some of whom are Hispanic/Latino). I'm not worried about diversity because our area is super diverse and the two public schools we like are also very diverse.

We have some around here and they are pretty cool! But they are at LEAST 30 minutes away. So it's not gonna happen.

Language immersion programs where the majority of the children are native in the target language can be problematic. I'd been considering the local Russian immersion for my daughter someday, but I've been told that it is mostly first generation Russian children who don't actually speak a ton of english, and the instruction is geared for them. That's just one experience, but it certainly steered me away.

we might put charlie in saturday korean school starting next summer when he's 4.

No, we're not doing an immersion program because we are already a bilingual household. I would only consider it if it were in our other language, German.

@banana: Oh I see.. thanks for explaining

I plan to send my daughter to a Chinese immersion school and the lack of diversity wouldn't be a hindrance. Sometimes I do get discouraged thinking about it though because even though I grew up extremely fluent in Chinese (I didn't even know English until I started kindergarten), as an adult my Chinese is just conversational and sometimes I struggle to find the right words. I forgot so much of it over the years... and it doesn't help that I never use it anymore since my mom speaks perfect english and my in-laws and DH are Korean.

DH's korean is the equivalent of my Chinese. I really hope sending her to a Chinese immersion school isn't fruitless because even our 2nd generation selves can't retain our languages very well... it makes us wonder how on earth our kids will be able to retain another language as 3rd generation kids.

@mamabear57: most likely! There aren't too many around here.

@Mrs. High Heels: I'm similar in the sense that I attended weekend Chinese school for many many years, and even studied abroad in Hong Kong for a year when I was 11 years old. I'm sure I was fluent for a time-being, but nowadays, living away from home and having a non-Chinese DH, my Chinese is soooo crappy, I die inside listening to myself speak it! It is my (sad) belief that DS will not be able to learn Chinese because of his lack of exposure to it, and even if I did send him to Chinese school, I don't have much faith that he would retain it given my own failure to do so. (This is probably my own mental issue at hand here!) Ideally, I would love for him to be able to communicate with my parents and relatives, who are the older generation and don't speak much English, and then if DS were to have children of his own who don't speak any Chinese, it wouldn't really matter, ya know? I feel sad on the relationships he could be missing out on with my relatives, but....meh, I shouldn't complain since I'm not going to personally teach it to him. Plus, my semi-excuse is that Cantonese is harder to learn than Mandarin! LOL