Heather Hodges

At the 2nd annual Family Festival we will celebrate our culturally diverse neighborhoods of East Tulsa by throwing a party for our children and families. 

There are many ethnicities and languages represented in East Tulsa and I believe we are a more vibrant community because of our differences.  While it is important that immigrants to our country assimilate into our culture and learn English we want to celebrate our differences and the richness of our respective cultures. 

For centuries  people from all over the world have been coming to America for the same reasons – freedom and hope — and then a Frenchman created a statue that embodied their hopes and dreams and the promise of America, “Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free…” – The Statue of Liberty. 

On Wednesday evening May 14^th, 2008 the Garnett Bilingual Preschool, the Garnett Church of Christ, and the Green Country Event Center will host the 2^nd annual Family Festival.  Admission to the event is free. 

There will be inflatables for the children, pony rides, a clown, a magician, face painting, balloon animals, and family style games such as three legged races, parent-child wheel barrow races, water balloon toss, and a hula hoop contest. 

We will have demonstrations by the Hmong cultural dancers, Karate Shikara by the students of José Munoz, gymnastics by Aim High Academy and the students of the Garnett Bilingual Preschool, Safari’s Interactive Animal Sanctuary, and a Magic Show by Michael Platten.

There will also be food for sale by Hmong’s Café, Wing Stop, barbeque by Chef Roy Victory, Mexican food from Carnicieria la Placita, and of course pop corn and cotton candy.

I hope everyone in the Tulsa area will bring their families by for food, fun, frivolity, and of course a little culture.  See you there!!!!

I just spent the better part of the weekend building a new website for the Garnett Bilingual Preschool. Coached by my brilliant husband, we decided to go with a blog format with static pages to display information. A new website in less than 48 hours, you’ve got to love WordPress.

For our end of the year celebration the Garnett Bilingual Preschool hosted a Festival Familiar / Family Festival for not only our own students but the whole community. The neighborhoods around the Garnett church building are primarily Hispanic so we strove to make our neighbors feel welcome and at home. We invited the children of Cooper Elementary and the Garnett Bilingual Preschool to sing for us. We also invited two Mexican bands and a blue grass band led by my good friend Dan Nieto to perform. We had my two favorite culinary choices, Mexican food and pizza, available to purchase. Volunteers from GBP and Garnett worked hard giving pony rides, tying balloon animals, popping pop corn, painting faces, and making snow cones. There were carnival games and 5 large Jupiter Jumps. Children from different cultures and tongues played together. The families of Garnett and the Latino community listened to great music and ate burritos together. I heard mothers of English speaking children bravely trying to remember their high school Spanish in order to speak to other mothers. Our two cultures came together in a fantastic and very fun way. Thanks to everyone who made the event happen, and especially to Sandy Schweikhard for going to all the trouble to bring the ponies and to Carol Brown, CMP (www.bonvivantweb.com) for her event planning skills. Well done!

At the Garnett Bilingual Preschool (www.garnettbilingualpreschool.com) we enroll students who speak either Spanish or English and put them in a classroom together with a bilingual teacher. Our school is a dual immersion program in which the kids hear not only 50% of each language every day but rather 100% of both. When a teacher gives an instruction in one language, she will then repeat what she just said in the other language. For example a teacher might say, “Let’s all sit down to hear a story.” She would then say in Spanish “Vamos a sentarnos para leer un cuento. ”

It has been an incredible experience for my own son, Elijah, who is in his second year of preschool. He has soaked up the language adventure and made friends across cultural and language lines. He and his best friends alternate between Spanish and English while they play. They will interject a Spanish word in an English sentence if they are not sure of the English word and never skip a beat. At home he sings in Spanish and will make comments like, “Look, the grass is verde and the perro is blanco.”

I have spoken with some concerned parents who are worried that teaching their child a second language will confuse them. Research absolutely refutes this. Children who learn a second (or third or fourth) language in early childhood will read sooner than monolingual children, score higher on standardized tests (ACT/SAT), are creative problem solvers, perform better in math and logic, and are more culturally sensitive. Some parents are concerned that the vocabulary of their bilingual child is delayed. In reality if you will count and add the words a bilingual child knows in each language it will usually be greater than a monolingual child’s.

Language acquisition is a fascinating subject and one that requires more study and conversation. I have the opportunity this summer to go to Europe to visit a childhood friend who speaks at least 5 languages. She is from Spain and we met in Paris in 1986. After university she moved to Germany where she met and married a Polish man. She now has 4 children. On a daily basis the children hear four languages in the home, English, Spanish, Polish, and German. Fortunately for me, all of her children are fluent in English.