Bilingual Preschoolers: Day Nursery and Kindergarten for Bilingual Children in Italy

Schooling is a big issue for all expat families. Is it better to send the kids to a local school, where they’ll learn the local language and integrate in the local society, or to send them to an international school, where they’ll grow with a more international profile and culture, but might risk living in a society a bit detached from reality and, not least, might cost a fortune?
Obviously there’s no right or wrong answer, each family will have to make its call, but let’s have a look together at the options available.

We’ll look at this from an Italian point of view, examining education options available to bilingual families living in Italy. However while schooling changes from country to country, most considerations will apply to most families wherever they live, in particular those concerning how to search and what to look for in bilingual education.
Let’s start by looking today at Preschoolers, i.e. Day Nursery (Asilo Nido in Italy) – 0 to 3 years – and Kindergarten (Scuola Materna) -2.5 to 6 years. We’ll look later at school age children, i.e. above 6 years.
Options available vary greatly depending on where one lives, Rome and Milan already don’t offer much, imagine what a smaller town or a village can offer… Moreover foreign language schooling in Italy focuses primarily on English, with few exceptions for other languages located in Rome or Milan or in the bilingual regions (Trentino Alto Adige for German and Val D’Aosta for French)

From now for simplicity we’ll use the word school to refer to both Day Nursery and Kindergarten, the options available for bilingual preschoolers are the following:
• International school, private
• Bilingual school, private
• School H&L, pubblic o private

International School
International schools (i.e. America, Enghlish, French, etc) adopt the structure and methodologies of their original country. From an international school one should expect that all the staff is native speaker in that language. However bear in mind that this doesn’t imply that the school is monolingual, because often many of the children enrolled are Italian or speak Italian as their first language, hence the children will most likely speak Italian among themselves. That said, it is a fact that the kids will hear a lot of English there, moreover these schools are more likely to attract foreign families, creating the opportunities to meet international playmates.
One should also ask whether the school adopts a specific methodology to encourage the children to speak English, and if so whether it is a strict one or not, or in general one the parents approve of.
Finally from what I discovered these schools target children starting from 3years, there is very little around in terms of International Day Nursery.

If you wanto to find such a school, a good (but not complete) starting point could be this http://italy.usembassy.gov/usa/education/schools-it.asp, or this if you live in Rome www.romeschools.org, plus in Rome there is also La Maisonette, which is mainly French but offers English too.
What to ask to an International School:
Are the teachers native speakers? Where are they from?
Which techniques do you use to invite children to speak English/French/etc?
How many children in the school are majority language (Italian) native speaker?
How much is it?

Bilingual School
Bilingual School can mean anything, so be prepared. Doesn’t look like in Italy there are specific rules, so pretty much anybody can decide their school is bilingual.
Some schools do have a native speaker teacher, who might keep the class either on their own or with an italian colleague, sometimes the all day, sometimes just for few hours here and there. But a school can call itself bilingual even if they offer just one or two hours of English per week, sometimes with an external teacher, which is pretty USELESS, because young kids don’t learn a language with one or two hours of exposure per week. So when you shop around for a bilingual school ask them to be very clear on the methodologies they adopt and the objectives they set for the second language, and then decide whether it’s worth the money (or the distance you’d have to travel).
According to my personal (and local) experience, 90% of so called bilingual schools for young children are pointless, but not all, plus you might have better luck in your area.
What to ask to Bilingual School:
Are there native speaker teachers? Where are they from?
How many native speaker teachers there are?
How many hours per week/day do you offer with native speaker teachers?
What are your objectives with regards to the minority language?
Which methodology do you use to teach the second language?
How much is it?

H&L School
This optino will interest more those who would like to introduce their children to English as a second or third language, rather than parents of English bilingual children. These are normal schools, either public or private, where the teacer has been trained with the Hocus&Lotus technique to teach a foreign language to preschoolers.
Hocus & Lotus has been developed by Rome University la Sapienza to allow kindergarten teachers to teach a foreign language to their children, the teacher doesn’t have to be fluent in the language to do that but the objectives are very clearly stated, children are expect to learn a certain number of words per year.
If you’d like to find out whether any school in your area offers H&L a good starting place is H&L’s website, but it’s not complete so you’ll have to ask around I’m afraid.

What to ask to H&L School:

Who does H&L? the class teacher or another teacher? (it should be the class teacher, as the methodology uses also the emotional bond between teacher and children to facilitate learning)
How often do you do H&L? (it should be done daily)
Which support do you do to parents to use H&L also at home? (for the methodology to be successful parents should expose children also at home, at least through some DVDs)
What are the objectives with regards to learning the second language?

Finally, a last word. Choosing the right school is very important, both for parents and for children. The kids will spend quite some time there, and it is important that they are happy and well cared for and that you are comfortable with your choice. So bilingualism is a nice plus, but my personal suggestion is to choose first a school you like and are comfortable with. And if you are a bilingual family, trust yourself, you can raise a child bilingual even if s/he goes to a normal school.

Next week we’ll talk about school aged children.

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