English in the Classroom

In the two classroom I visit, only a hand-full of the students (about 3 or 4 to be more exact) are learning English as a second language. Mrs. Brown (the kindergarten teacher) speaks Spanish and I have noticed that it seems to help. Mrs. Brown does not use Spanish often, mainly she uses it to communicate with the parents who come in.  She also used it once while we were working in centers, I was trying to communicate the task at hand to a little boy, he just didn't seem to understand what I was saying.  Mrs. Brown spoke over my shoulder in Spanish and he seemed to understand.
During these early years in childhood language acquisition is at its peak.  Therefore, it is important that educators are constantly immersing the with all sorts of language to strengthen the child's understanding.  It has been amazing for me to see how well a given student can speak English in comparison with the non-English speaking parent.  At this early age, I believe that children pick up the language primarily through being constantly surrounded by it.  Teachers can also aid in the language acquisition process. I also think that a list of weekly vocabulary words (primarily for the first grade classroom and older), could greatly aid a classroom that is linguistically diverse.  Not only would this help ESL students learn more words more quickly, it would also help the native English students understand the origin and meaning of a given word.  I think that the Content Cognitive Dictionary could be a great strategy for teaching those new words.