Kids Love Learning Language at Savoir Faire

A special thank you to:

The kids and their families

Our staff and teachers

who participated in this Video

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Brain Scans Show that Being Bilingual Can Ward Off Alzheimer’s Effects

By Karen Merzenich on October 17, 2011

Previous studies have shown that being bilingual may delay dementia, but for the first time, a Canadian study has used brain scans to offer additional proof of bilingualism’s protective effects on the brain.

Research conducted up to this point has compared older people that speak either one or two languages to gauge the age at which Alzheimer’s symptoms begin to show. Based on this kind of research, there is solid evidence that bilingual people have a later onset age for cognitive decline. The new study, published in the journal Cortex, added results from CT scans of the brains to further bolster this kind of finding.

The researchers scanned the brains of bilingual and monolingual people who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and who had comparable cognitive skills and education levels. What they found was that bilingual people with twice as much Alzheimer’s-related brain damage were cognitively at the same level as monolinguals with much less brain damage. They concluded that despite the physical brain being destroyed by Alzheimer’s, the cognitive function of the bilingual people was significantly better preserved than that of the monolinguals.

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Kids LOVE Our Summer Camp Crafts

Cultural Crafts 

In our Redondo Beach classrooms, we see that our kids are as fascinated by culture as they are interested in learning some words in a foreign language. To this end a portion of Savoir Faire’s summer camp curriculum is designed to feed our campers' curiosity by constructing crafts with a cultural aspect.

For example, in our Chinese camps, the kids learn about the origin of  dragon boat races through stories and pictures and models and then they make their own craft from paper and balsa wood.