Visitors from Around the World

It's not unusual to have visitors in our Kindergarten classrooms several times a week. Last year alone we hosted over 450 visitors, not including the hundreds of teachers that visited us virtually by peeking into our classrooms during live video lessons every week! Visitors come from in county, from other places in the state, from other states and occasionally from outside the United States. Sometimes we see administrators and sometimes teachers and occasionally parents.

For instance, next week we have teachers and administrators scheduled from Texas and New Mexico. But last Friday we once again hosted a very distinguished early childhood educator from China, Ge Yang. She has a daughter, Betty Fang S. Bienert, living in Jacksonville and spent an entire day at the school earlier in the month. However, she was back on Friday to spend the morning in our Kindergarten inclusion class to see how we deal so successfully with children that have unique challenges. Her daughter speaks fluent English and Chinese but Ms. Yang only speaks Chinese. It was so interesting to watch her interact with the children. Smiles and laughter are the same in any language! She took pages of notes (in Chinese, of course!) and through her daughter asked many interesting, thought provoking questions.  There is no question that having so many visitors makes us better!