Bilingualism is a Super Power

Sycamore Creek Elementary School sits on a grassy knoll on the outskirts of Pickerington. It overlooks a pond where there are houses on one side and cornfields on the other.

At first glance, you may not guess the depths of the diverse community that thrives in this building.

The K-4 school is home to students and staff connected to more than 45 countries and 22 languages! Sycamore Creek recently celebrated this diversity with its first Love Our Languages student-led tables where participantswere able to learn about the languages used in Sycamore Creek from the experts – the kids! The languages represented at the fair were Arabic, Fulah, Twi, Ukrainian, French, Nepali and Spanish. Bilingual books, games, and a school-wide scavenger hunt helped make the Sycamore Creek Language Fair an interactive learning experience for everyone!

The week consisted of daily classroom-level activities where students discovered just how broad the linguistic diversity of their class and school is! Students learned about multilingualism and its impact on the brain, and even had conversations about language bias and dialect differences.