Welcome.
The messages below are for new Americans.
For your convenience, all text below has also been recorded in English.
Click here for Español.
What Every Latina Mother Should Know
About Georgia’s Schools
Generally, education in the United States is pretty good, but schools everywhere have significant trouble teaching reading. The quality of reading instruction in the U.S. is very uneven. Before your child can learn to read English, he or she must learn to understand and speak English. This takes quite awhile, so your child is likely to fall behind in reading. Imagine listening to a teacher lecturing in Japanese. This causes two problems. First, the child doesn’t understand what the teacher says even when paying attention. Second, the child starts daydreaming.
Here in the U.S, about 50% of Hispanic children in 3rd grade are behind in reading. Some will be two grades behind. Most of these children will have a lot of trouble doing homework in 4th grade. They will have trouble reading instructions, reading books, and writing reports. In third grade, teachers gradually stop teaching reading in order to focus on other subjects. A child who is two grades behind will have trouble understanding and remembering advanced reading lectures.
If Your Child Falls Behind in Reading
At first, your school will do what it can to help your child without worrying you. Once they have decided they need your help, they will tell you your child is behind. By that time, your child may be way behind in an environment where the tools for helping your child are not very good. They will probably tell you to hire a tutor, which is can be very expensive. The school may even advise you to avoid speaking Spanish in your home. At Bristol Standard, we think that’s very bad advice. Your proper goal is a bilingual child. It will be a big advantage when your child becomes an adult.
Reading Tutoring
Improve English Skills
In the long run, reading tutoring will be less expensive if used to help your child get ahead. Of course, your child may not ever need tutoring and tutoring could be a waste of money. Just keep in mind that children who get ahead in reading tend to stay ahead because they see themselves as smart. Surprisingly, a child who speaks Spanish and has just learned to read in English, can easily adapt those skills to reading Spanish as well.
Accent Reduction
For Adults Too
The Reading on Rails reading program will help your child learn the extra sounds English has and learn them without an accent. We can also reduce your accent in the same way. Accents have four parts:
- Malformed speech sounds,
- Speech sounds that either don’t last long enough or last too long,
- small vocabulary,
- scrambled grammar.
Once your accent is fairly good, reading familiar stories in English will help you learn English’s strange grammar and grow your vocabulary in a pleasant way. Even if you don’t know how to read in Spanish now, you will wind up with that capability as a result of the tutoring.
Reading Insurance™
Listen
This program is for children who run a high risk of falling behind, but haven’t fallen behind yet. It costs $88.00 per year and is good for children between five and ten years old. Your child receives four reading skill check-ups each year. The benefits are covered below.
Passing Your Spanish Heritage To Your Children
Surprisingly, only about 50% of second-generation Latinos become bilingual. As an adult, your child might see this as a wasted career opportunity. As a parent, you might want to pass on key elements of your cultural heritage, like the Day of the Dead, traditional medicine, la Semana Santa, and your favorite recipes or music. Bilingualism will allow your child to make new friends and converse with your relatives when you return to the country of your birth. It could also help your child become a crucial employee or a successful businessman here in the United States.
For most Americans, learning a second language is nearly impossible. That won’t be true for your child. He can learn Spanish from you and English from the people here. In Georgia, freelance Spanish interpreters earn 60 to 80 thousand dollars per year. Because English and Spanish both have similar roots, a child who knows one language can easily learn the other. You just have to create the right circumstances.
Of the four skills required for reading, three of them are exactly the same in both English and Spanish, so good reading instruction is the key ingredient for raising a bilingual child. The table below shows the four skills.
| English Skill: |
| Spanish Skill |
| Comments: |
| Very Hard To Learn |
Instant Letter-Sound
Recall
| Identical |
| Hard To Learn |
Letter-Sound
Blending
| Identical |
A Spanish letter’s sound is always the same. In English, the sound of a letter depends on which letters are nearby. This makes reading much harder. English also has odd combinations like t-h-r, t-c-h, & s-c-r.
| Very Hard To Learn |
Left to-Right
Habit
| Identical |
In a word with six letters, they may start at the end or in the middle.
Once this mistake is made, it’s impossible to say the word correctly.
| Fairly Easy To Learn |
Grammar
Interpretation
| Different |
English and Spanish have the same parts: subjects, objects, verbs, & adjectives, but they’re used in different orders.
Your child will just read the words in whatever order they’re presented–and will do so fairly well as soon as he has learned to read English.