Sandra M. Canas came to Cambridge from El Salvador when her son Miguel was four years old.

Canas couldn't find a Spanish language day care center so she put her son into an English language program. Within six months, he no longer wanted to speak Spanish.

"He would cover his ears and say, "I don't want to hear that language,'" Canas says, remembering the times she tried to speak with her son in Spanish.

So Canas enrolled Miguel in the Cambridge Public Schools' Amigos program, a Spanish-English bilingual program for Spanish-speaking and native English speaking children.

"Miguel was forgetting his Spanish [in day care] because he was not in an environment where he was hearing and speaking it," Canas says.

Miguel is now in sixth grade in the Amigos program, and Sandra Canas says that through the program, her son is fluent in both Spanish and English.

Miguel Canas says his sixth grade class has gone to the Maynard school to teach a first grade class in Spanish.

"It's a good class to take," says Miguel Canas, adding that he was sure Spanish would be useful when he needed a job.

The Amigos Program

Amigos is a seven-year old program at the Maynard (Kindergarten through third grade) and Kennedy (grades four through six) schools. It is a "two-way bilingual program," differing from traditional bilingual programs in that it attempts to teach English-speaking students Spanish and Spanish-speaking students English at the same time.

Traditional programs enroll only non-English speaking students and seek to teach them English.

The Amigos program begins in Kindergarten and now continues through sixth grade. Kindergarten and first-grade students are taught for half of each week in Spanish and half in English. In second grade, the schedule changes to week-long blocks in each language.

"We haven't seen any student confusion [with the switch]," says Margarita Cordova, a Kindergarten teacher in a Spanish classroom of Amigos. "They know which days are English and which are Spanish better than their parents do."

"The philosophy of the program is to separate the languages," says Mary T. Casabon, coordinator of curriculum and testing for bilingual education programs.

This, Casabon says, forces children to focus on one language at a time.