A new childcare center has opened in South Saint Louis with a special mission: to create a language immersion daycare environment where Saint Louis area children can gain fluency in another language.
Passport to Learning Language Immersion Center offers a multilingual learning model where children can get on the path towards bilingualism and multilingualism during the most formative years of brain development, before the age of 5.
Passport to Learning is currently enrolling a full-day French immersion program for ages 2-5 with Spanish and Portuguese as secondary program languages. In this program, children will be immersed in French as the primary language of communication for all daycare routines. As children become accustomed to French as the immersion language, they will also participate in immersion-based enrichment activities in the secondary program languages, Spanish and Portuguese, throughout the week. Additionally, one learning session per day will be led in English to prioritize literacy and kindergarten readiness topics.
Owner and director of the center, Laura Straube Tiago, believes that with the amount of time and money that families invest in early childhood care and education for their children, daycare programs should be maximizing the opportunity to prepare children as global citizens with fluency in more than one language. A native speaker of English with fluency in French, Spanish, and proficiency in Portuguese, Straube Tiago brings 10 years of certified classroom teaching experience and graduate studies to the development of this program.
“With everything we know about how children effortlessly acquire language during early childhood, we can offer this opportunity to families while meeting their needs for daytime childcare. It is amazing to see that after one or two short months, a two-year-old can already understand the language used for daycare routines and activities, and can even reply with 2-3 word phrases in French. They really do acquire a new language in the same way as their first language.”
“In order to become fluent in a language, it is suggested that 30% of the child’s waking hours should be spent communicating and interacting in that language, a standard that can easily be met in a full-time or even some part-time daycare programming. If a child can gain fluency in another language during their daycare years, we are preparing them not only for kindergarten, but for their future as members of a global society.”
The goal is that children will graduate from the program with a developing fluency in French similar to that of their first language, a readiness for kindergarten in an English-speaking school, and a working knowledge and familiarity with Spanish and Portuguese.
“Once children move on to kindergarten, we also host after-school language clubs for French and Spanish for grades K-6, offering a path for students to continue their language learning journeys if they do not have consistent access to the language in their elementary school.”
“For many children, access to learning another language comes too late or is too limited to be effective. While some elementary schools offer language classes as an elective, many children do not encounter a language class until middle school or high school, and some, not at all. Additionally, the effectiveness of studying a language in a class later in life is far less than what is possible in an immersion environment during early childhood. On the other hand, if a child participates in an immersion program and develops a foundational fluency during their formative daycare years, they can reinforce and continue their language development with classes, clubs, or contact with the language throughout their educational years.”
The opening of this educational center is an endeavor rooted in a passion for language education and family. Straube Tiago states, “Passport to Learning Language Immersion Center is the merging of my professional, personal, and academic endeavors. With the birth of my youngest child, I realized again the need for more diverse early childhood programming in the area. With my experience with French, Spanish and Portuguese languages, the timing was perfect for me to create the program I was looking for. I am pleased to offer a specialized and linguistically enriching program for the benefit of families and children in our area, including my own.”
Laura Straube Tiago is an educator, a linguist, a mother, a wife, an academic, and a lover of literature and travel. She is invested in making language immersion education more accessible to Saint Louis area children.
