January 2012 Parent Newsletter

December 2011 Parent Newsletter

November 2011 Parent Newsletter

October 2011 Parent Newsletter

September 2011 Parent Newsletter

The Romance Languages Spread at OLL

OLL’s students inhabit a multicultural city with a strong Italian culture. Thanks to a generous grant for an Italian teacher from the Italian American Committee on Education, OLL’s lower grade students are now learning to speak and sing in Italian! Last year, Italy’s vibrant culture and rich history were brought to OLL by way of famed Italian monk and creator of traditional music notation, Gvido Arezzo. The school’s art and music teacher incorporated donated computerized music-learning software into her classes. The software gently pushed students into Arezzo’s realm by representing the solfegio with symbols and colors that synthesize both concrete and abstract elements of music. Students have also come to recognize Gvido’s influence in the hip hop, regaton, and bachata music they listen to each day, and are now learning to express themselves and sing their own songs in Italian.

Italian Teacher Mrs. Luciana Curti began teaching at OLL in early September and is already amazed by student progress—“The students have been practicing hard and improving daily. It is wonderful to see how far they have progressed from first learning how to introduce themselves with simple greetings and are now mastering idiomatic expressions and vocabulary.”

The presence of a new Romance language at OLL has further united our student body. Our language buddies program initiated last year now includes Italian in addition to Spanish. However, students of the younger grades are now teaching their older peers some phrases in Italian in exchange for the Spanish stories they read to them—bravi bambini!