“Students who are given the opportunity to express themselves in more than one language will likely experience many advantages if they begin and develop these skills early on — as early as possible — at infancy or toddlerhood being the ideal starting point for second language acquisition,” said Melika Matlack, the academy’s lead Spanish Immersion kindergarten teacher. “The importance of learning a language at a young age is crucial for tapping into improved cognitive skills and hone the basic capacity to fluently speak them.”
SIP is considered a “strand” program, Matlack noted, which means it’s an immersion program within a non-immersion school. She added that this offers families interested in fostering bilingualism and biculturalism in their child the option to do so while still benefiting from a Moravian Academy education. Students in SIP receive all homeroom instruction (math, social studies, and language arts) in Spanish, while specials (music, gym, art, science, and library) are taught by English-speaking teachers.