The teaching of world languages plays an important part in the Waldorf approach towards education. Ocean Charter School strives to teach each student two world languages from the 1st grade through the 8th grade as an eight-year continuous language program. Currently, we are only providing one language, Japanese, while planning to add Spanish in the future.
Developing the ability to communicate in the target language is an important goal we strive to achieve, however, the purpose of teaching world language in our school is to raise the student’s social consciousness and cultivate an interest in and respect for others. World language study is seen as a window into the soul of another culture, allowing the student to realize the similarities and differences when compared to his/her own language and culture. This realization strengthens the student’s identity, develops his/her empathy to understand others and gives him/her a different perspective to see the world.
The teacher brings the target language to the students in an experiential way through repetitive imitation, literature, music, artistic projects, games and movements – all in the target language. The students are surrounded by sense impressions of the foreign culture, mentality and linguistically. In the lower grades the students are engaged in songs, games, recitation and play to reach the feeling life – to surround the students with beautiful impressions and to stimulate the will activity by enlivening the lesson with movements and games. As the grade levels progress, students still learn by the experiential approach to acquire their linguistic skills with the four elements of the target language: listening, speaking, reading and writing.
The uniqueness of Ocean Charter School’s world language program is the integration with the main lesson curriculum. The teacher strives to create lessons that integrate the main lesson theme into the language class. For example, the 8th grade students study American Modern history and World War II during their main lesson. At the same time, during the Japanese class, the students are learning about the life of Japanese Americans in the internment camp or the life of Japanese people living in Japan during that time. Through this integrative teaching of their main lessons and the world language lessons, the students can be exposed to a wider perspective from which to learn their subject matter such as history, literature, geography, or even science.
As a whole community, we support our cultural exchange program and in house celebrations to strengthen the students’ experience of diversity. We created relationships with schools in Japan to exchange letters, a school-wide Japanese student visit and an OCS families’ homestay program. In addition to these cultural exchange experiences we celebrate Japanese culture in a variety of ways which include the seasonal festivals, cultural presentations such as Taiko drum performances, Japanese flower arrangement classes, the 4th grade one-hour Japanese play and the language class field trips which are the highlights of the World language program.