Essia Bernstein

Our distinguished enrichment program offers a broad range of extracurricular options. Our objective is to offer our ethnically diverse and rich community language learning opportunities with a balanced theory and practice curriculum as we are as mindful of your child’s social and emotional needs as his academic growth.

We strongly believe that by integrating a play-based philosophy into the curriculum and engaging students in ways that motivated them are key to make their learning experience a success. We use “technology-infused and old fashion-infused instructions” to engage our students in ways that they can relate to.

To achieve that goal, the foreign languages are associated to the universal language of art. Instruction of artistic skills is performed not only in English but also in Spanish and/or French. We also use power point presentations and computer-based programs to supplement and/or provide practice of the target language. We do offer differentiated learning for our students so they can learn at their own pace and be challenged according to their existing level. We strongly believe that new languages can broaden the horizons and offer more opportunities in the future as the students discover their own linguistic and cultural heritage or chose to open doors to new languages and cultures.

At Bay Language Academy, we remind ourselves daily that the ultimate purpose of language learning is communication. Conjugation, grammar and vocabulary acquisition are reinforced within themes to reach this ultimate goal.

Through TPRS, songs and role play dialogues, we design language lessons in order to also expose our students to a diverse range of accents.

Our approach fits within a modern-day look at language learning but also incorporate older approaches that showed to be very efficient in term of reaching a good level of proficiency. Every student learn at their own pace and have different abilities, so working with learners around those criteria, makes the path of proficiency more enjoyable.

A growing number of studies shows that the most effective and engaging way to teach children a new language is to surround them with emotional, tactile (especially for the kinesthetic learners), experiential and acoustic inputs. Therefore, we aim to provide children with an environment in which they will experience language learning in a meaningful, real- life context.

Our curricula includes but are not restricted to: (a) Grammar and sentence structures; (b) Conversation skills through role-play; © Language history; (d) Conjugation; (e) Vocabulary acquisition developed through games and interactive plays in order to memorize vocabulary; (f) phonetic exercises; (g) reading and comprehension through TPRS; (h) Listening and understanding through videos (MP4), sound tracks and songs (MP3). The children study specific Spanish speaking countries over the course of the year and learn different aspects of the culture.

Our philosophy is to adapt a set of classroom practices rather than one and only teaching method with the goal to link classroom language learning with language activities outside the classroom and to expose our students to native accents, regional vocabulary and culture differences.

Our students have the opportunities to learn languages through acquisition and immersion, through action, contemplation, reflection and emotional engagement.

We aim to provide proficiency and fluency in French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, English as a Second Language (ESL) as well as Creative Writing & Comprehension, SAT and AP preparation. Chinese calligraphy, drawing and painting classes are some of our classes as well.