nothin Fair Haven Bilingual Students Sprint Toward… | New Haven Independent

Fair Haven Bilingual Students Sprint Toward Anda!”

En sus Marces. On your marks. Listos. Ready. Go! Fuera.

That’s how bilingual teacher David Weinreb put his game sixth graders through their paces — both athletic and academic — during recess this week on the sunlit green expanse at the Fair Haven School on Grand Avenue.

The students were learning some vocab, including English words to enhance sports vocabulary like running, sprinting, fast, javelin, hammer, and so forth. In the process they were also preparing for Anda!

That’s the third annual run/walk fundraiser race to support the Haven Free Clinic for uninsured adults in Fair Haven.

The event kicks off Saturday morning at Jocelyn Square Park. The event has raised over $21,000 of a projected goal of $35,000 for the mainly Yale-staffed Saturday clinic for uninsured adult Fair Haveners, which is housed at and partners with the Fair Haven Community Health Center.

Weinreb is an interpreter that clinic. He has been working to broaden the support of Fair Haveners and citizens at large, starting at home.

That is, in Weinreb’s classroom, his and his 14 students’ home on the third floor of the school. That’s where he has gotten nine of his kids all signed up and ready to go. Now he has organized some of his curriculum in support of the race.

Allan Appel Photo

At the 887-student K‑to-8th grade school, immigrant newcomers are welcomed and at least 20 languages are spoken. Weinreb is a second-year Teach for America teacher with a quadruple passion.

He, of course, teaches the academic subjects while transitioning the kids as much as possible to English. In the process he also wants to enrich their Spanish language and culture from the different Spanish-speaking countries the kids hail from.

That’s in part why the class, which has three Ecuadorean students, is reading a novel from that country, Verde fue mi Selva, by Edna Iturralde, or How Green Was My Jungle.

Weinreb, who got his bilingual creds working for five years at a charter school in largely Dominican neighborhoods of Washington Heights in Manhattan, said the Caribbean Spanish word for bus’ is guagua, while Central Americans say bus, autobus,’ or camion.’”

His other two passions: to make the kids fluent in a third language as well, the digital language. So most of the exercises, readings, and learning go on in a computer-based paperless classroom.

Perhaps most of all, Weinreb seeks to advance health in its largest sense for the kids and families of Fair Haven.

Hence the involvement in Anda!, which has been preceded by Weinreb’s seeing that all his kids received free bicycles through various New Haven programs. He has helped to lead the school committee that has cleaned up vegetation at the margins of the school. They’ve brought in sports equipment like snazzy new soccer nets. And this season they’ve enlisted the New Haven Land Trust to create the lovely still-tomato-bearing raised garden beds beside where the kids were practicing their sprints.

I’m interested in everything health care in this neighborhood,” he said.

Before the recess and the sprints, Weinreb donned an orange bandana in his classroom — a signal to the kids that he is speaking 97 percent in English. He and guided them in opening their Chromebooks to Imagine Learning, a web-based English language learning platform.

Claudia Munoz Torres and Jean David practice using “sprint” and “turn” in the same sentence.

Thanks to a grant the school was able to obtain, each student has his or her own computer.

During the next 30 minutes kids like Angel Roblero Velazquez and Claudia Munoz Torres worked at their own pace. In all their activities Weinreb has imparted to his students that not a second is to be lost. That’s why Angel was checking out a map of the world in his book while his program was loading up.

The school year is barely a month old. Angel arrived just year in New Haven with his family from Southern Mexico. He has many fewer words than other kids like Claudia. Still, he likes social studies, especially Egyptian history, which the class will be doing this afternoon. Each kid has at least two jobs in Weinreb’s organized classroom; Angel is the maestro asistente de estudios sociales.”

Meanwhile, across the classroom, Weinreb pointed out that to answer some of the questions in her program, Claudia was using Google Translate.

Weinreb in the classroom.

He could see on the screen — without having to lean over any kid’s shoulder — how each student was doing. On his teacher’s computer he could see that based on their scores Stacy, Jean, and Mark all likely needed some specialized help.

Most of the families — even those recently arrived like Angel’s — have some internet access, Weinreb said.

Now, because Anda! was approaching (and a reporter had come to visit) it was time to escribe 5 palabras de vocabulario de correr.”

After that, the kids exercised their bilingual muscles in coming up with sentences in which sprint” and turn,” two words they’d come up with, were both deployed.

You sprint when you run fast,” said Jean David.

Next up on the Anda!-centered language lesson was a story in English about a school in Georgia where the kids were getting new exercise programs. The kids read the story aloud,taking turns, and, copying Weinreb’s style, pausing after three or four words for the group to pronounce the next.

When they came to idiomatic phrases, Weinreb paused and asked What does walk laps to music’ mean?” Jean David got the meaning, but explained it in Spanish, which was just fine.

Lileschka Martinez Vazquez with her teacher after the practice sprint.

After the article, the kids answered questions like what the main idea of the article was; which of the following sentences was least important to the main idea; and what might be another good title for the article.

Before each answer was offered, Weinreb urged the kids to discuss the question and come up with an answer among themselves. Most of those discussions were in Spanish. But then the kid who raised his hand, representing the thinking of the group, offered the answer in English.

Colleges that the students might want to attend — like Duke and University of Virginia — each received a star for a correct answer, placed there by Lileschka Martinez Vazquez, whose job in the classroom is the scorekeeper.

Outside, on the grass, after a couple of practice sprints, I asked her what aspect of English learning she found hardest and which easiest. She said writing is the most difficult, and speaking is easier.

Then I asked Lileschka her favorite word in English so far. The answer: horse.”

Why?”

Because my animal favorite is horse,” she replied.

Weinreb gently explained to me — and to Lileschka — that it came out that way because the adjective-noun order is reversed in Spanish.

Then Weinreb corralled his and the other sixth-grade classes to line up to go back in the building for the rest of their day.

In addition to his own students and colleagues participating in Saturday’s race, Weinreb has invited 40 or 50 of the Teach for America staffers in Connecticut to spend the morning of their retreat on Saturday at the Jocelyn Park race and festivities afterwards.

Those include singing by Tere Luna, a Mexican folklore performer, and vending/cooking/food provided by New Haven Farms.

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