As third graders at Hawley Elementary School entered the school’s multipurpose room on March 26, Newtown High School Spanish students greeted them. Soon, Spanish could be heard from every corner of the room as the students mingled at tables.

The event was the brainchild of NHS Spanish teacher Paula Olmos-Valeri, according to Foreign Language in Elementary School (FLES) Spanish teacher Marianne Grenier, who works with students in Newtown’s elementary schools.

After NHS Spanish College Prep and Honors students wrote children’s books in Spanish, Ms Olmos-Valeri reached out with the idea to have her students visit an elementary school.

In 2015, Newtown Public Schools began teaching kindergarten students Spanish, and each year, the program has expanded up one grade level. This year’s third grade students have been taking the program since kindergarten, according to Ms Grenier.

“Throughout these past four years, we have learned dozens of songs, read hundreds of books, and had countless hours of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in a second language,” Ms Grenier said in a recent e-mail. “Research shows that learning a second language... at a young age, specifically before adolescence, can be acquired more readily, can remain in long-term memory, and enhances individual’s adaptability in sounding like a native speaker.”

She also explained learning a second language can have social and emotional impacts like, “elevated awareness of different cultures and social justice, as well as enhancing creativity, stronger vocabulary skills, and even a proclivity for language categorization and greater intellectual capacity, as language learning involves both hemispheres of the brain.”

Near the start of the event on March 26, Ms Grenier, Ms Olmos-Valeri, and NHS Spanish teacher Sarah Chow led the students in singing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” in Spanish.

After singing the song, the third graders divided into groups to listen as the high school students read books, which all chronicled the daily routines of characters like Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob SquarePants, Snoopy, and Cinderella.

The third graders were the first group to meet the NHS students during the visit. Second grade students, first graders, and kindergarteners rotated through meeting the high schoolers in the multipurpose room.

“It was beautiful,” said Ms Olmos-Valeri as the third grade students exited the room at the end of the group’s rotation.

The high school students were impressed by the third graders.

“They knew much more than I expected,” said ninth grader Rachel Arena.

“They know how to figure out a word,” said ninth grader Ben Ochs.

Overall, a group of the high school students agreed that the younger students were “so cute.”