Elementary students walked the red runway wearing paper bags on June 30.
The Emergent Bilingual summer school hosted its first alphabet fashion show at Fuller Elementary.
“We're celebrating the end of summer school and all of the language that they have learned this year,” Aubrey ISD Communications and Web Director Eva Coleman said.
Parents brought lunch to eat with their children after the show.
“We like to involve our parents as much as possible, so this seemed like a great way to get parents up and have them experience the projects that their kids are going to be working on,” ESL Director Monica Molinar said.
The program aimed to improve student language through summer activities.
“We've been working on listening, speaking, reading and writing skills,” Molinar said. “We're trying to find fun things so they don't even realize they're learning the language and put that to use in everyday things that they could run across.”
Aubrey’s ESL program has grown dramatically as population increases in the area.
“When I started, it was pretty much Spanish and English only,” Molinar said. “We may have a foreign exchange student or a couple of students sprinkled in that spoke a few other languages, but we were always under five languages spoken in the district for years.”
The district now has 53 languages including Spanish, French, Telugu, Portuguese and Swahili.
“We're excited about it,” Molinar said. “We have students represented here today that probably speak about 36 of those languages.”
Staff use an app called Talking Points to communicate with parents whose main language is not English. Parents can choose what language they wish to receive messages in and respond in their main language which the app automatically translates.
“It’s super helpful for making sure that all of our parents are getting messages from school that they understand,” Molinar said.
The ESL program hopes to encourage bilingual students to meet their highest potential, according to their website.
“Our goal for students is to start learning and feel comfortable in school,” Molinar said. “We work on some of those basics that they're going to need to build on for the rest of their education and career.”
