IN THE CLASSROOM:Younger students learn Spanish

The students greeted their teacher in unison: “Buenos dias senora McGovern. ¿Cómo esta, Ud.?”

Gladys McGovern, Señora McGovern to these students, answered: “Estoy bueno clase. ¿Y Ud., cómo esta?”

No, this wasn’t first-year Spanish at a Newport-Mesa Unified high school. This was one of two 20-minute Spanish sessions a week for kindergartners at St. John the Baptist Catholic School in Costa Mesa.

“The faculty really felt a need for it,” said Father Norbert Wood, rector of the private school. “We practically live in a bilingual area. We wanted to give our kids an edge.”

At St. John, that “edge” begins to take shape in kindergarten and lasts through eighth grade, with the classes becoming progressively longer as students move up in grades.

“We want them to test out of [first-year] Spanish by their freshman year,” Wood said.

It sounds like they’re on their way.

Many of the 5- and 6-year-olds can already recite numbers one through 10, identify colors such as red and blue (rojo and azul) and name different parts of the body — all in Spanish.

“They are young. Their brain is like a little sponge. Everything you say they repeat,” McGovern said.

This is McGovern’s first year teaching at St. John. She visits several classrooms a day. She has previous experience at other local schools including St. Joachim Parish School in Costa Mesa.

“They are very quick learners, but it depends on how you introduce the lesson,” McGovern said. The attention-span of the younger students is short, so McGovern employs active teaching to keep the kids interested.

If she’s not running around the room picking up books, backpacks, or pens, and asking what they’re called in Spanish (libros, mochilas, and boligrafos or plumas, respectively), she’s likely holding up colors or carrying on conversations between hand puppets.

“Parents are basically happy with anything that furthers their child’s education,” said the class’ home teacher Margaret Murillo.

She noted McGovern is indirectly teaching her the increasingly common language, too. Fortunately for the kids, she said, “they’re getting in on the ground level.”

At St. John, the push for bilingual education was fueled by faculty.

“We’ve really been wanting to do this for a long time,” Murillo said.

The program comes a year after St. John added a Latin-language class for seventh- and eighth-graders.

Learning Spanish in Southern California, McGovern said, “Es muy importante.”