APOPKA, Fla. – A Central Florida school is teaching students about different cultures and languages before some of the students have even learned to walk.
Star Child Academy in Apopka is teaching 100 elementary students how to read, write and speak a foreign language. The languages are not among the most common, like Spanish or French. Instead, students are learning Russian, Chinese and Arabic, which may seem more difficult mainly because of their alphabets.
"The world is growing, you know? Our world is changing. People have to be more in tune with other people's cultures," Aria Williams-Hatcher, who has a son in third grade, said.
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Williams-Hatcher said it's amazing that the kids get the chance to learn more challenging languages.
"We're amazed. We didn't have those opportunities when we were kids, you know? School was a little bit different then," Williams-Hatcher said.
Cindy Zimmerman, the owner of the school, said they're teaching what they believe to be the strategic languages of the future.
News 6 at Nine's Carolina Cardona was invited to the school's Arab-American Heritage Month Celebration last week.
During the event, students from different grades performed the "sarcophagus dance," which included the burying of a mummified chicken as part of a science project. They also learned about the different foods and, as part of the festivities, the academy celebrated its first spelling bee with third-grade students. The kids had 10 seconds to write down the word in Arabic. At the end, Anabella Jodarski got all of the words correct.
"I feel like it's fun and it comes naturally to me," Jodarski said.
That may be because Jodarski learned as a baby, which is a practice Star Child Academy uses to make sure their students become fluent.
"Teaching them at a young age, those languages help their cognitive ability and also connect brain paths that may never (have) been connected by hearing these sounds and speaking these words," Zimmerman said.
Amal Luqman, the Arabic teacher at the academy, said it takes a while to master the language but serves students well once they do.
"It's a very intricate, beautiful language. You start reading from right to left. Once the students master all 28 letters, it really becomes easy. It makes me so happy and proud that a lot of them show so much interest in Arabic language," Luqman said. "It just allows them to become that smarter. It just allows them to become open to so many things as they grow up in life."
Star Child Academy has seven institutions in the Orlando area, all of which offer a foreign language, including American sign language.