Portsmouth program teaches kids language through song

PORTSMOUTH

The first-graders giggled as their teacher prepared to take them on a world-class trip.

Click on the seat belts , their teacher urged them. First stop: France.

“Un, deux, trois, quatre,” they sang from their classroom seats.

Moments later, they detoured to a Spanish-speaking country.

“Mi cuerpo, mi cuerpo hace música,” rang out.

“Mi cuerpo hace cha-cha-chá!”

Gwendolyn Jenkins, the Portsmouth Public Schools’ music supervisor, smiled as the kids jumped, clapped and moved their feet back and forth while singing foreign words that flashed in vibrant colors on a large screen.

Since September, kindergartners, first- and second -graders at Douglass Park and two of the city’s other elementary schools have participated in Music Speaks, a pilot program that aims to introduce them to nine languages.

School leaders say it is probably the first time that some of Portsmouth’s younger elementary school kids are learning foreign languages, even if it’s just the basics, in a school-division -sponsored program.

“I’m glad to be here because now I know French, I know Spanish, I know Italian,” Douglass Park second -grader James Wilson said. “I want to teach kids all around the world.”

Jenkins’ goal for Music Speaks is to put the world at students’ feet.

In a school system where more than half of the children qualify for free or reduced lunch, Jenkins wants students to dream about a world beyond Portsmouth and be ready to take it on.

“Our children don’t have enough exposure to a lot of things,” Jenkins said.

She came up with the idea for Music Speaks earlier this year after reading a newspaper story that said Portsmouth would once again for go an elementary school Spanish language program because it couldn’t afford it.

“We can do this,” she thought.

Jenkins’ can-do attitude sprung from growing up poor but having parents who showed her how to rise above deficient economic circumstances and from attending an all-black elementary school in Portsmouth where teachers and students made do with little.

“Some kind of way, the teachers came up with ways to make us successful,” Jenkins, 53, said.

Jenkins is a shining example of this success. She said she graduated among the top of her class at then Manor High School. She went on to Norfolk State College, now Norfolk State University, where she earned a bachelor of science in public school music and graduated with the highest grade point average from the Class of 1977.

That same year, she said, she studied music education as a fellow at Ohio State University .

In 1978, Jenkins came back to Hampton Roads, initially teaching music at I.C. Norcom High School before moving on to other city schools.

Sometimes, Jenkins, like the division’s other music teachers, taught her elementary students songs written in foreign languages. They learned the words and grasped concepts quickly, she recalled.

It dawned on her that the division’s youngest students would probably enjoy and pick up other languages more easily if they were incorporated in a formal music program.

“Music facilitates memory,” she said.

This spring, she finally had a notion of what a program that merged music with foreign language could be like.

She took her idea to Beverly Jackson, the division’s supervisor of gifted and talented and foreign language . Jackson had already brought a summertime Spanish-language enrichment program to the city’s third- through eighth-grade gifted and talented students.

Jenkins and Jackson co-wrote a proposal.

By singing songs in foreign languages, elementary students would, for example, learn numbers, days of the week and greetings in Latin, Russian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese and Arabic.

The program would run at Douglass Park, John Tyler and Churchland elementaries – schools with vastly different racial and economic demographics. Each class would participate in the program for 45 minutes about once a week.

All the division needed to buy were CDs and instructional books for teachers. The total cost would be about $1,500, much less than the $270,000 proposed for a Spanish-language program for sixth- graders this school year.

The project got the green light.

One day last month, Churchland teacher Amanda Nitz played an Italian lullaby on a piano as students put their heads in their laps or leaned on their classmates and closed their eyes.

Other times, Nitz sat with her legs folded on a carpeted platform and strummed a guitar as her students tapped the African-style drums while singing numbers in Spanish, written in a marker on a board.

A few weeks later, John Tyler Elementary teacher Marie Weber introduced her students to German by first having them join her in singing a cappella in English the words to a German song. Then, they sang the song in German.

Finally, they listened to a recording of the tune.

Music Speaks is different at each school because the instructors teach as they see fit.

“A child should not have to fit a program,” Jackson said. “A program should fit the needs of the child.”

Students at Churchland are more likely to have traveled abroad and to have heard foreign languages at home than those at the other two schools, Jenkins and Jackson said. So at Churchland, for instance, the students might spend less time on repetition than at Douglass Park.

When Nitz asked what language the words “lasagna” and “pizza” come from, 7-year-old Madeline Firestone yelled, “Italian, like opera!”

Madeline said she and her dad have listened to opera at home. She also learned some Spanish at a private preschool.

Next month, staff will brainstorm how to strengthen Music Speaks for the remainder of this school year and next, when Jenkins said she hopes it’s offered in all 14 of the city’s elementary schools.

Tiffany Firestone, Madeline’s mom, is already pleased with what her daughter has learned.

“She comes home and sings these little songs and says, 'This means so- and- so in Japanese, and this means so- and- so in Italian,” Firestone said. “It’s wonderful.”

Cheryl Ross, (757) 446-2443, cheryl.ross@pilotonline.com