Más Tiempo, Más Frutas
Imagine you are growing a plant. You give the plant six months to grow. It gives you fruit, and you are happy with it. But you want bigger, sweeter fruits. So you grow another plant. Only this time, you give the plant a year to grow — twice as long.
That is what is happening right now with Judah’s Spanish program. Judah is giving students more time to grow in Spanish by starting Spanish lessons earlier — in seventh and eighth grade.
The fruit of the Spanish program is fluency and mastery of the Spanish language. At Judah, we are taking steps toward better fruit by giving students more time to grow their skills.
In the 2025–2026 school year, two Judah seniors, Amelia Kerlin and Michael Oshimokun, and one Judah junior, Matthew Mattox, earned the prestigious Illinois State Seal of Biliteracy award. Two other seniors, Ada Osaji and Jack Dalbey, and seven other juniors, Aubrey Sather, Kelsi Drollinger, Anya Kennedy, Trinity Everett-Walthour, Suzana Coulter, Zachary Hafermann, and Rylee Krall, qualified to receive a Commendation Toward Biliteracy.
This fruit was good, but we want more. So this year, Judah has expanded the Spanish program — from starting freshman year to starting in seventh grade. This expansion will help as many juniors and seniors as possible to earn their Seal of Biliteracy and raise the overall expertise and biliteracy level at Judah Christian School.
According to a study by the United Nations Information Centre for Western Europe, at approximately 12 years old, our brains start shifting from an unconscious way of learning to a conscious one. Conscious learning is better for subjects like math, science, and other advanced courses of study, but for learning new languages, unconscious learning is much more effective.
Younger kids can learn language techniques more easily because they are not totally familiar with their first language’s grammar and rules yet. They do not try to, in the words of the UN experts, “adopt the linguistic rules that they already know, which sometimes contradict the new ones.” That seems to be what most older kids and adults do, and that makes it harder for them to really learn new languages.
It has been scientifically proven that learning a new or second language from an earlier age is a better way of learning the sounds, words, and ways of the language, since a child’s brain is still developing.
The earlier start of Spanish classes will let students go farther in their Spanish journey than they ever have before. Judah principal Mrs. Llano said that “bringing Spanish into the junior high is a better bridge for high school.” Students will experience the language earlier, making it more natural for them to speak and think in another language. Freshman Stephanie Edwards said that her younger sister, who goes to a fully bilingual school, is “learning Spanish at a younger age, and she’s learning it a lot faster, because kids soak up information like a sponge.” She wishes she would have learned it earlier too.
Apart from starting to learn at an earlier age, interacting with the language in a comfortable environment gives students exposure that will help them in their language learning journey. This is important because, as Mrs. Llano told us, “so much about language is exposure.” Most bilinguals or even polyglots say that you don’t truly learn a language until you are eating, sleeping, and breathing that language.
Judah’s Spanish teacher, Mrs. Haegele, told us how immersion is already active in the seventh and eighth-grade Spanish classrooms and how students “are coming to class, and spending their class, just using the language.” She said, “They’re hearing it over and over and over again.” In Judah students’ case, they now have more opportunity to eat, sleep, and breathe Spanish, whether through study-abroad years like our very own alum Amelia Kerlin or just by being exposed to it in class at an earlier age. Having the chance to get full immersion in the Spanish language early on will give Judah students the opportunity to expand their knowledge past Spanish 4 to the AP level or even beyond.
Not only will earlier Spanish exposure expand our knowledge of other cultures, but it also can expand our own Judah culture. Students can come together through Spanish. This is why Mrs. Llano felt it was important to expand the Spanish program to lower grades. She said, “It has been part of Judah culture in the past, and we want to bring it back.” It is a way that we can become more connected across grade levels, as the program continues to root down into lower grades.
Seventh-grader Gabriella Bouton said that she is excited to “learn about different countries and their cultures.” She said, “I’m excited to learn about the different ways that you say certain words.” And she said that the Spanish program is really helping her do those things.
The growth of the Spanish program down to grade school is Judah’s ultimate goal for its progression. This would give students an even smoother transition into high school and AP-level Spanish. If this grade-school expansion happens, we might even get an entire class to earn their Seal of Biliteracy. Our hope for the years to come is to have a fully Spanish-immersed school that not only glorifies God in English but also in Spanish and perhaps in even more languages to come.
—Ama Pérez Barinaga, class of ’30, & Suzana Coulter, class of ’27
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