1st Thanksgiving

CISC Pre-K kids getting their first taste of turkey. In fact, none of them had ever SEEN a turkey before.

WARNING:  CUTE KIDS!

Not only bilingual (Mandarin/English) instruction to prepare kids for success in kindergarten, CISC focuses on bicultural identity development as well.

Trick or Treat

Yesterday, kids from our bilingual Pre-K program dressed up and went trick or treating around CISC. For most of them, this was the first time they had experienced Halloween. The looks on their faces when they realized that all they had to do was say, "trick or treat" and people would give them candy... priceless!

As part of our efforts to connect the generations, the kids ended up their trick or treating at Sunshine Garden. The seniors there had already prepared for the event with their own Halloween celebration, arts and crafts. They exchanged candies with the kids for beautiful autumn leaves that they took home to decorate with.

All in all, it was a fun morning. Even when we overheard one girl telling her friend how she didn't know if she could carry any more candy her bag was so heavy!

Bridging the generations - Sunshine Garden seniors and Pre-K children celebrate Halloween together

Students Meeting Students - in Mandarin

The CISC Step Ahead Preschool program had some special visitors last week - a Chinese-speaking middle school class from Lakeside School. It wasn't the students' first visit to CISC; they've also visited the Play and Learn program as part of their regular service learning trips. The Lakeside class is a mix of students who speak Mandarin at home and students who are learning it as a foreign language, and they had the chance to practice their Mandarin skills, play a few games, and visit the library with the Step Ahead kids. Maybe by the time our Step Ahead students reach middle school, they'll be making their own preschool visits?

Chinese and Other Immigrant Kids

In data just released by the City of Seattle, children in various types of preschool programs were tested on English language vocabulary. Children who score lower than 85 points in this test are known to have more difficulty learning to read and to write in the future.

Not surprisingly, native English speaking kids scored highest, averaging 99 points.


More interesting is that Asian kids scored lower than immigrant children from Africa (but still slightly higher than Spanish speaking kids), further dispelling the myth of the Model Minority.

This further demonstrates the need and importance of CISC's bilingual Step Ahead preschool program - helping to prepare our children to be ready to succeed in school!

Halloween 2009

As promised, some photos of the pre-K kids trick-or-treating. First a walk through all of CISC's offices, then story time and more goodies at the ID/Chinatown library.

Trick-or-Treating

Today, our pre-K students got all dressed up and went around CISC trick-or-treating.

Unfortunately, the video of them with their goodies was botched, but we'll get pictures of them soon. In the meantime, watch this cute video of them getting ready!



We really like watching the boy trying to figure out how to put on his policeman's jacket.