Global History Regents Review

I would like to welcome everyone back from the spring vacation.  I hope everyone had a healthy and restful time away from school.  Best wishes for a productive and happy week to all of our students and staff members. It's wonderful to see you all back at FIHS.

McLaughlin writes about the myth that " THE YOUNGER THE CHILD, THE MORE SKILLED IN ACQUIRING A SECOND LANGUAGE".

I find this myth to be very pervasive amongst people everywhere. It's interesting to me that research shows only an advantage for younger children in terms of pronunciation and not in other areas of language development. What's significant in this research to me is the idea that older learners (i.e. adolescents) bring knowledge with them that helps them learn another language. Students use their native language knowledge to help them construct meaning in their second language. It's the difference between a deficit-oriented model of language learning and one that sees bilingualism as an asset. Often, adults will say, "I'm too old to learn another language. I wish I had studied it when I was younger." In my experience, older language learners often do have more difficultly in mastering pronunciation.  read more »

I want to welcome back all of our staff members.  I especially want to welcome our newest staff members, Lily, Amie, and Monica, as well as our ISTART apprentices, Maria and Kate.  Today begins our summer professional development days and the countdown to the first day of instruction on Tuesday, September 2nd.  I'm looking forward to another oustanding year at FIHS and, of course, our second graduating class.

I'm feeling useful providing tech support to Grace's Writing Project class.

Here's how you add an attachment - just a test.

I wonder why all of those 12th graders were either early or on time today?  (I guess we might have to plan a senior trip each week from now on.)

I'm finally back online after a lenghty absence.  Thanks to Steve Burt (give me a link  here Steve) for his fine work on the new FIHS website redesign.  As with the older version of the FIHS, we're using Drupal again and hope to have much more curriculum and student work onlin in the weeks and months ahead.