Small Planet, Part 7

Second-grader Yelena Kovlenka perches on a tall stool in one corner of the classroom, her smooth forehead furrowed in concentration. "Beluga, beluga," she says aloud to herself, flipping through the pages of a hefty library book, Whales: The Nomads of the Sea. "I can't find beluga whales."

Teacher Anita Chase, wearing the crisp captain's hat she sports during the ocean unit, leans over the little girl. "Let's look in the index," Chase suggests. The teacher guides Yelena to the chapter she needs.

"Ahh!" Yelena says. She reads eagerly. "Beluga. No dorsal fin. Lives in the icy Arctic. Eats fish and—what is this word?" she asks a staff assistant who's cruising the room, helping out where needed.

"Squid," the assistant reads.

"Squid," Yelena continues, "and bottom-dwelling …." Stuck again on a prickly word, she looks at the assistant.

"Crustaceans," she says. "Those are shellfish like shrimps and crabs."

Watching the little girl with red woolen leggings and a blond ponytail soak up facts from the reference book, you'd never guess English

is her second language. She didn't know a word, in fact, just three years ago when she and her parents Yekaterina and Andrey arrived in the U.S. from the Black Sea resort town of Gelendzhik—

a popular vacation spot where her dad worked construction and her mom grew and tended the flowers that festoon the city in summer. Afraid for their child's future in a country rocked by economic and political unrest, the couple decided to emigrate. They joined relatives in Vancouver, where a fast-growing Russian community has taken hold.

The Russian-speaking staff at Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary—the school attended by three of Yelena's cousins—welcomed the family warmly. Still, her parents worried as they sent their only child off to school in a new land.

"For a week, I couldn't do my work at home," Yekaterina confesses in Russian. But her nerves quieted down quickly.

"Yelena has liked school since the first day," her mother reports. "She cried when she got sick and couldn't go

to school."

Like all the language-minority kids at Roosevelt, Yelena was a part of the mainstream classroom "from the very first day," says Title VII Coordinator Katrina Walla. The native-language support from staff assistants, both in the classroom and in small pullout groups, is what Yelena's mother likes best about the school. "Sometimes the Russian children don't understand the content in English," she says. "But they don't get behind because it is being explained to them in their native language."

After three years at Roosevelt, Yelena is bilingual. She shifts easily from language to language: One moment she's reading scientific terms in English. The next, she's whispering to her less-fluent friend Anna, translating an assignment (or the day's lunch menu) into Russian.

Ask Yelena what subject she likes best, and she'll hem and haw, knitting her brow as she thinks it over.

"I like math." Pause. "I like reading, too." Pause. "I like research. And science!"

As for her aspirations, she says "maybe a doctor, maybe a teacher—I don't know."

There are so many choices —and that's just the point of coming to America.

"Here, if she studies well and works hard," her mother says, "she can achieve anything she wants to achieve. In Russia, doctors and teachers are almost starving. I didn't see any opportunities for my child over there."

—Lee Sherman

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

This document's URL is:

Home | Up & Coming | Programs & Projects: Northwest Education | People | Products & Publications | Topics

© 2001 Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory

Date of Last Update: 9/28/01
Email Webmaster
Tel. 503.275.9500