Youngsters Learning Spanish As A Second Language

Five-year-old Amanda Panagos knows her “Hokey Pokey” - in English or Spanish.

“You are supposed to do it like this,” she said, in English, tapping her toe in front and waving a hand like a showgirl.

The familiar music started and Panagos and a gaggle of her fellow preschoolers started singing along in Spanish and twirling like Thing One in “The Cat in the Hat.”

“…Agita la otra mano, y tambien el otro pie, bailemos hokey pokey, giremos una vez y volvamos a empezar,” they sang.

Panagos is part of an experiment in Spanish funded by several Mead High School teachers. The teachers - all parents of 4, 5 or 6 year-olds - have hired a Cuban woman to teach Spanish to their children for three hours a week.

The lessons are outside school and aren’t funded by district funds, although principal Steve Hogue lets them meet in an empty high school classroom after school. The teachers each paid $65 for a six-week class.

The students have been meeting with Acacia Prieto-Komelasky, a native of Cuba and a former student teacher at the high school, on Monday and Wednesday afternoons for the last five weeks.

“My life has been so enriched by speaking a foreign language and I want my daughter to have that experience,” said Susan Tuson, a Spanish teacher who has her daughter, Lindsay, in the class.

Prieto-Komelasky’s work seems to have paid off. The students roll their r’s, whisper their h’s, and smile their gap-toothed smiles through their l’s as they sing and recite numbers.

“At this age, their brains separate one language from the other,” said Prieto-Komelasky. “It is proven in studies. It is easier at this age.”

Cheryl Mokel, a math teacher at Mead High School, was amazed the first time Karyn, 5, had Barbie and Ken talking to each other in Spanish. Neither Mokel nor her son Kyle, a fourth-grader at Brentwood Elementary, speak the language, but both have found themselves singing along when Karyn belts one out in Spanish.

The class is taught as an immersion class - which, translated, means no English is spoken. Mead High School students who were exchange students but have settled in Mead - Naelly Galvan, from Mexico, and Veronica Naravi, from Peru - help minimize chaos and the number of students who wander off.

The teachers have paid Prieto-Komelasky to continue lessons through Christmas. As Thanksgiving and Christmas approach, Prieto-Komelasky plans to give lessons in Latino interpretation of the holidays.

For information about future classes, call Tuson at 468-1751.

Lakeside math team tops

The Lakeside High School math team of Joe Tenny, Jim Gilles and Mike Witt took first place in the small school team division last week at the Washington State University math competition.

The team also took second in the problem-solving game PROBE Problems Requiring Original or Brilliant Effort - at the same competition.

Mead DECA students honored

You can’t blame Mead High School senior Minda Dentler for being a little cocky.

After all, she just organized a school DECA project that generated 280,000 tabs off the tops of soda pop cans, far surpassing all other schools in the state, including Central Valley High School.

When asked what that many tabs looked like, Dentler said, “It looks to me like we gave a whuppin’ to everyone.”

At a DECA conference in Seattle last weekend, Dentler and the DECA class were honored as the top program in the state, in part because they had given a “whuppin’ ” to other area schools in a contest to collect the most tabs off the tops of soda pop cans.

Dentler, DECA president for most of Eastern Washington, started a recycling program in the high school with an “outrageous” goal of 150,000 pop tops.

The response from the school was “unbelievable,” said Mead High School DECA teacher/advisor Brock Taylor. A special education class taught by Pat Tyson collected 61,000.

“I guess their grandmas have been saving,” said Dentler.

When the tabs are eventually recycled, the Ronald McDonald House will get the proceeds. Dentler, Annie Crego, Jill Wellman and Robin Janney - the primary organizers of the pop top competition - will be mentioned in a national DECA newsletter next month.

Walk of Fame has new members

Rogers High School inducted 11 new members into its Walk of Fame, an honorarium for distinguished alumni.

Among those inducted: J. Arvid Anderson, class of 1963, named among the top one percent of attorneys in the country; Etta Ferguson, 1934, took in nearly 500 foster children with her late husband over her 77 years; Bertha Slagg, 1935, was the first cheerleader at the school; and Harlan Douglass, 1956, the largest single landholder on Spokane’s North Side.

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MEMO: Education Notebook is a regular feature of the North Side Voice. If you have news about an interesting program or activity at a North Side school or about the achievements of North Side students, teachers or school staff, please let us know. Write: Jonathan Martin, Education Notebook, North Side Voice, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210. Call: 459-5484. Fax: 459-5482.