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Horn Elementary showcases revived International Week, distributes bilingual books to kindergarteners
Summary
Horn Elementary presented the school’s October International Week to the Iowa City Community School District board, highlighting multilingual student projects, a family picnic and a grant-funded distribution of bilingual kindergarten books.
Horn Elementary Principal Cannon and a team of English-language-learning teachers described an expanded International Week the school revived in October, emphasizing student work and family engagement.
The presentation, given by Liz Wilmore, one of Horn’s ELL teachers, outlined goals and activities for the week. "Horn is a school with over 400 students. We have currently a 121 students in our ELL department," Wilmore said. She told the board ELL students at Horn represent "over 25 languages spoken" and said the school replaced a single evening event with a week of activities to increase depth of engagement.
Wilmore said the district librarian compiled multicultural books for daily read-alouds, the PTO purchased books highlighting students’ home countries, and students produced country profiles and interview videos to share in homerooms. The week concluded with a family picnic and a final dress-up day when students were invited to "wear traditional clothing, patriotic wear, team jerseys, or anything that represented their country or home culture."
Wilmore also reported a grant from the ICCSD Foundation that funded bilingual books for kindergarten ELL students. When asked how many books and languages were included, Wilmore said there were "29 books for kindergarten students. I wanna say 12 to 15 languages." She added that the books were distributed at the end of International Week for families to take home.
Board members asked about communication and interpretation supports for families. Wilmore praised machine-translation tools in use, saying, "TalkingPoints...has been instrumental in getting to families," but cautioned that "a machine translation is not as good as a human translation" and recommended shorter messages when using machine translation. She said in-person interpreters are arranged for conferences when available and that services such as LanguageLine are used when not.
The board expressed appreciation and interest in attending future events. President Malone invited the school to invite the board to next October’s event.
The presentation closed with board thanks and no formal action taken.
