Puerto Rico Trip a Success for Windom

Earlier this month, . Together with students from Emerson Spanish Immersion Learning Center, along with staff and parent chaperones from both schools, nearly 70 fourth and fifth graders spent a week in Puerto Rico, attending summer school, touring the island, and exploring nature. 

Calling the trip “cutting edge education,” principal and native Puerto Rican Lucilla Yira noted the significance of the excursion abroad. The fourth and fifth grade Minneapolis students who made the trip were the first such elementary school students in the district to have this kind of traveling immersion experience. 

The inaugural trip was a successful one, and it may just be the start of a new tradition. 

Yira was proud to report how well her students fared at Dr. Modesto Rivera Rivera, the school where the fourth and fifth graders took classes. The principal and teachers commented that the students from Windom and Emerson demonstrated Spanish language skills on par with those of the Puerto Rican students.

In addition to schoolwork, the students experienced the natural wonders of Puerto Rico, from the rainforest to Bioluminescent Bay.

Colleen Simmons, parent of triplet fourth grade Windom students, made the trip with her daughters. Leading up to the adventure, Simmons hoped her children would have the opportunity to apply the skills they’ve acquired at Windom in an authentic setting. Today, she feels the trip served its purpose. 

The proof was in watching the kids hold their own, speaking Spanish with the locals and acting as interpreters for some of the parent volunteers.

“Watching the kids, I really saw, ‘Check us out; we can do this. Sometimes it’s too fast, but we can figure it out,’” Simmons said.

Both Simmons and Yira commented that spending time in a Spanish speaking country offered a unique reversal of majority/minority culture for the students. 

Simmons does not speak Spanish, but her fourth grade daughters are all fluent and thrived in the environment where Spanish was a constant. 

“It was like, ‘Wow, okay, Mom’s the minority now,” Simmons said. “It was a whole new paradigm.”

For the Minneapolis students whose first language is Spanish, being in Puerto Rico changed the paradigm as well. 

“The Hispanic students were shining because it was their native language. They weren’t the minority for the first time,” Yira said.

Though the week-long trip in a Spanish speaking country was uncharted territory for an elementary school, Yira said it was what she expected and more – and she considers it now part of the curriculum at Windom. She would like to take an even larger group of students the next time around. The school plans to visit Puerto Rico every other year, possibly returning to the same school and possibly visiting others on the island. On alternating years, students from Puerto Rico will visit Minneapolis. Plans for next year are already in the works.   

“This experience gave all the students, no matter their academics, a higher level of thinking, higher level of exposure–that’s what dual immersion is all about,” Yira said.