The Perks Of Growing Up Bilingual
Going into my first years of elementary, I never really had any trouble with English. My first language is Spanish. I grew up talking in Spanish to both my mom and my dad all the time. But as I got older, I started talking to my sister in English and because of that, I Skipped pre-K because I didn’t need a lot of help with knowing how to write, read, and talk in Spanish. So going into kindergarten, of course my teacher was still a bilingual teacher because everyone in my neighborhood was latin/hispanic. So apart from knowing Spanish she knew english as well but it wasn’t a bilingual class. It was just a regular kindergarten class. I remember this one assignment she had given us, which was that we had to use the words she gave us on a sheet of paper to form sentences. I remember being the first one to finish the assignment. Some kids were still having trouble to form sentences because they couldn’t make of some of the words that were on the paper. For me, because I’ve been writing and reading in English since before I started school, it was easy. Since I had finished my assignment before everyone else in the class, the teacher congratulated me in front of the whole class for being able to finish early and without any help. Because I had already finished, I was able to do whatever I wanted to like draw, play, take a nap, whatever. Of course, as long as I was still inside the classroom. While all the other kids had to try and figure out how to form the sentences. This made me realize how lucky I am to be able to know how to talk, read, and write in both English and Spanish at such a young age. I didn’t struggle as much in my first years of elementary school due to what I already knew. I feel like if you know a certain language well enough, especially English, then you won’t struggle as much in whatever it is you’re doing because wherever you go there’s going to be at least one person who knows English. Knowing English is kind of like a perk because everyone knows at least a little bit of English. I guess you can say that English is a universal language. Of course I never forgot how to read and write in Spanish thanks to my parents which I’m thankful for because I didn’t want to loose that side of me; my Latina side.
