This section of the paragraph was thought-provoking in my opinion because when we are so focused on the use of English at home, we don't really fully consider the quality of the interaction. We cannot expect the parents to provide meaningful English interaction if they are not comfortable with English themselves. As teachers we need to understand the parent's perspective of acquiring English and practicing at home. Personally, I think we should focus on encouraging the parents to maintain the use of their native language as much as possible at home with their children rather than fully adopting the English language. This also made me realize how we as teachers need to ensure we are providing our students with meaningful English interactions within our classrooms.

-Lauren Mitchell

This is frustrating as a teacher pursuing a concentration in multicultural and linguistically diverse students. Personally, growing up I was always interested in learning about other cultures and enjoyed listening to and learning other languages. Thinking about how culture and language was avoided in the school system back in the day, made me wonder how students felt in their classrooms. Currently we focus on creating a welcoming environment for all students to feel comfortable and safe to embrace who they are as an individual. I wonder how this effected the students when they had their own family, did they encourage their children to embrace their culture and native language? How can we help families reconnect with their culture and language?

-Lauren Mitchell

I think this is important for us to consider as teachers, since we need to remember the importance of our nonverbal cues, especially with our younger students. In one of the CLD courses I took last semester, our lesson plans needed to included nonverbal cues and gestures to ensure understanding and provide both scaffolding and support in our students' language learning. As future teachers we need to think about the cues and gestures we use when communicating with our students, to ensure we are conveying our instruction clearly and meaningfully to them.

-Lauren Mitchell

If our bilingual and multilingual students are failing in mainstream classrooms due to a lack of opportunities for them to apply context-embedded strategies, isn't this a result of our teaching strategies rather than their learning abilities? In some of the other CLD courses I have taken so far, we focused on learning our students' prior knowledge of a subject before introducing new information and if students did not have the necessary prior knowledge we had to develop methods of providing the students with the essential background knowledge needed. In my fieldwork placement currently, my cooperating teacher before having students read a new story, provides students context of what the story will be about then has students work together in partners to create a KWL chart just based on the pictures and challenging words from the text. For example, our last story was about a prairie fire, so he informed students about the time period the story takes place in, the environment and lifestyle of the characters and their home to help build their prior knowledge before reading. He even showed a short video of "Little House on the Prairie" for students to visually see what life was like on the prairie.

-Lauren Mitchell

In one of my courses this semester, recently I read an article regarding translanguaging. In the article, the author shared about a classroom who focused on the use of translanguaging during their writing. The teacher had encouraged students to write a story in their native language. Once the students had finished writing their stories in their native language she had students share their piece with another student who spoke and wrote in another language. Students were engaging in varying languages, learning new languages and translating various stories into multiple languages. The teacher shared how they had a few students who had no one else in the class who spoke their language, but during the translating activity these students were frequently approached to share their language. I think implementing translanguaging is important for all students to learn about other languages and provides our bilingual and multilingual students more opportunities to engage with their native/home languages within the classroom setting.

-Lauren Mitchell

When Baker mentioned how Livia would respond in English when her parents spoke in another language, I was reminded of a student I had in the aftercare program I taught. My student was in fourth grade and his family spoke Farsi at home. When his parents would come pick him up they would usually speak to him in Farsi. His mother would always share about her trips back to their home country and bring us traditional foods from her country. However, she was disappointed about how her son would always respond in English when they spoke Farsi, she mentioned how she wished he would speak in Farsi with them. My lead teacher was interested in learning languages and one of them was Farsi, so she would speak to him in Farsi whenever she had the chance. I wonder how we as teachers can help encourage our students to learn their native/home languages and help them feel empowered about being bilingual and multilingual.

-Lauren Mitchell

I have seen this occur with some of my friends and students when they are interacting with their family members. At work one of my coworkers would praise our Spanish speaking students in Spanish because she thought it would help build a better relationship with our students, which I completely agree with. I wonder what effect multiple linguistic repertories would have on children in different scenarios of emotions such as praise, discipline, and love. For example, does this better convey the emotions and seriousness of the parents or family member to the child in a more meaningful way?

-Lauren Mitchell

This is interesting to learn about and I would agree early bilinguals may have more advantages, like how they may learn at a faster pace. This reminds me of one of my students currently at the daycare I work at because his mother speaks English and his father speaks Spanish. He has to learn new words from both languages in order to effectively communicate with and understand his family members. I have noticed, since he is younger, he will sometimes switch between languages when speaking, but enjoys learning and using new vocabulary from both languages.

-Lauren Mitchell

I think dynamic bilingualism is important for us as future teachers to acknowledge and understand. I also wonder how majority languages within the individual's everyday life impacts the changes between their usage of their languages. In the classroom this could effect teachers because we may become accustom to the use of English with our emergent bilingual students, however, we should still encourage and provide opportunities for students to use of their native/home language during learning. As teachers we should allow opportunities for students to further develop all their languages.

-Lauren Mitchell