Curriculum - Bilingualism
Why Chose a Bilingual Education?
Some of the reasons why families seek to enrol their child/ren in our preschool:
- Brain studies indicate that the learning of another language develops unique higher order thinking, knowledge and skills.
- Languages learning extends competency in the first language.
- Learning another language develops and extends children's capabilities to understand and use languages as systems.
- Second language acquisition develops intercultural aptitude,which allows children to engage as members of, and move across local, regional and global communities. It has the potential to create broader opportunities for employment in the future.
Bilingual and Pedagogical Program
Our Preschool was founded on the proposition that a bilingual upbringing offers advantages superior to single-language education. We believe that social and personal development together with academic development should advance simultaneously.
Our teachers are highly qualified in French Education.
Children enter the bilingual preschool when they are between 3 and 4 years of age, and stay for two years. The preschool offers full-time preschool places only. Part-time attendance would compromise the French language teaching effort.
Some of the children who leave the Preschool go on to the bi-national Telopea Park School. Unfortunately we cannot offer priority entry to Telopea Park School because they run their own independent selection process and make their own determinations. They set aside some places for children of French nationals.
Modern educational methods are indispensable in order to create a rich background, in which carefully planned games and activities help children in their holistic development.
Curriculum
Families are encouraged to propose ideas for staff to implement within the curriculum.The children's interests, strengths and ideas are taken into account and respected when planning the French program. The program includes small group as well as whole group activities and the children are offered a variety of choices.
The progressive immersion program into the French language is based on the French Preschool Curriculum, which covers all developmental areas:
- Children learn to live together (social skills).
- Children learn to move (evolve) in the world (gross motor skills, knowledge of the environment, sensory activities).
- Children discover the world (mathematical, scientific and technical activities, environmental issues, discovery of the concept of time and space).
- Children are given the opportunities to imagine, feel, create, (artistic expression). Children learn to speak and build their oral language and become acquainted with the written world (written, pre-reading and oral communication).
At the French Australian Preschool, the children are still developing their home language and learning a second language simultaneously. The second language is introduced progressively throughout the two years that the children spend with us.
