Unique Spanish Immersion Preschool Program
Lety’s Preschool & Immersion Program offers a unique Spanish Immersion program for families in the Truckee/North Lake Tahoe area. Children are taught Spanish through various methods including games, activities, and conversation. We strive to ensure that children in our care will be fluent in both Spanish and English by the time they enter kindergarten.
Families in our program are encouraged to be involved as much as their time allows. We love to have parent volunteers come into the classroom and read to the children or play games. We provide a wide variety of activities and a large base of exposure as a guide for our children to grow and learn.
Our curriculum provides children with the skills they need to develop, grow, learn, and have fun! This includes:
- Art
- Outdoor Play
- Math
- Special Events
- Science
- Language Arts
- Movement
- Sensory Activities
Each of these daily activities gives your child the skills they need to expand their language, and coordination, become self-aware, and most importantly create lasting friendships.
Programs
At Lety’s Preschool & Immersion Program, your child will enjoy a day filled with fun, learning, and new discoveries. Children learn best when they regulate their own environment, making discoveries and integrating the knowledge they gain into their lives.
Lety’s Preschool & Immersion Program offers a full foreign language immersion program that is unique to the Truckee North Tahoe region. While some childcare centers and preschools offer a foreign language component as part of their curriculum, Lety’s Preschool is unique in that all children spend all of their day learning in Spanish language.
We deliberately chose to invite infants, toddlers, and young preschoolers into a shared environment to promote and facilitate a number of developmental and learning objectives. Relationships developed with children from outside the home enhance their communication skills and ability to behave effectively in a group setting.
Our program includes reading stories, offering arts, crafts, and other projects, monitoring socialization and motor skill development, and leading the children to the next step of their early childhood development. Our enriched and varied physical activity and exciting projects ensure that your child also develops strong coordination, values physical and nutritional health, becomes self-aware, and creates friendships.
Spanish Immersion
Most of the children attending Lety’s Preschool & Immersion Program are native English speakers and therefore, the majority of our students are in a foreign language environment.
Language immersion programs are associated with proficiency in children’s second and home language, as well as improved self-esteem and cross-cultural attitudes. Impressively, we have had a number of children who have been learning Spanish as their third language.
While the children are frequently heard conversing between themselves in English, the teachers speak Spanish to all children at all times. We use numerous contextual factors in second language acquisition, including Spanish labels on classroom and play objects, as well as Spanish music and books.
Experts in learning foreign languages stress the numerous benefits of learning a foreign language at an early age:
- When children learn multiple languages at a young age, they develop a life-long love of communicating with others.
- By incorporating foreign languages in a school's curriculum, children develop a greater appreciation for diversity.
- When young children learn about the structure of other languages, their ability in English is enhanced.
- Because the brain automatically compartmentalizes each language correctly, young children have the ability to learn many languages without getting confused.
- When children learn a second language at an early age, they will achieve a more native grasp of both grammar and pronunciation in the second language.
- Lety’s Preschool & Immersion Program understands that many of our parents may not be Spanish speakers and because of this our lead teacher, Leticia Aguilar, is fluent in English. Her ability to fluently speak both languages and her familiarity with the immersion language education theory allows her to provide a warm and welcoming environment to all family and community members.