Three good reasons to choose the Scuola Marco Polo
- Play-Based Program: our curriculum offers playful, age-appropriate learning opportunities for children of all level of Italian from beginners to advanced.
- Community: Scuola Marco Polo believes that Italian language, traditions, music and culture are essential tools to create a unified community. We are happy to celebrate Italian and American feasts with families of diverse background and culture.
- Safety: we do everything to make children safe and secure all the time paying attention to every detail of our classroom design and standards of cleanliness.
Our Philosophy
Our curriculum consists of an innovative method based on Total Physical Response and inclusive learning-by-playing approach. The Scuola Marco Polo method is based on research that describes children having the most educational and deepest learning when they experience fun and creativity. Activities include but are not limited to fun all-together interactive activities such as dance & singing, games & music, and act & learn in Italian.
In addition to these classic activities for kids, we will teach cooking methods and theater techniques such as classic comedy and drama.
Learning objectives change with classes, age of students, and level of comprehension. In general our courses try to enhance:
- Ability to listen and understand simple to complex Italian phrases put in context of specific situations
- Ability to understand main and more complex commands in Italian
- Enrichment of Italian vocabulary
- Ability to verbally express some daily activities in Italian
- Improving Italian language skills
We treat all the children equally, always keeping their enthusiasm for improvement and their curiosity to discovery new things in the first place. Therefore, students will be able to overcome stress of learning a new language, by transforming this activities into small parts. Students are energized by doing what they love, making new friends in a spontaneous learning environment.
Outcome
Bilingual education provides cognitive advantages:
- Developing a very active and flexible brain
- Developing more flexible approaches because of the ability to switch between languages
- Developing ability to ignore irrelevant information
- Focusing, remembering, and making decisions
and social-emotional advantages:
- Maintain strong ties with their entire family, culture, and community: social identity
- Make new friends and create strong relationships in their second language: social diversity
- Children show better self-control
Other scientifically proven benefits of bilingualism are:
- Bilingualism may delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease
- Bilingual adults have more job opportunities around the world than monolingual adults
- Bilingual employees earn an average of $7,000 more per year than their monolingual peers
- Bilingual citizens are active members of the global community, due to their multi-language knowledge
- Bilingualism frees people from biases and limited thinking