Growing Up

A Vision of the Future

Growing up with Rainbow Bridges

What do you want your child to be like after they’re grown up?

Your child’s future

Perhaps your child is a preschooler now. She will grow much in the coming years. Consider what kind of person you hope she will become, how you would like her to turn out.

How will a long-term investment in Rainbow Bridges English lessons affect her life?

We provide a rich environment, a strategic plan, professional guidance, and a community for her to develop into her potential as a capable and active member of society and beyond into the global community.

The following imagines a future your child builds with our support.

The journey begins in the classroom

Perhaps she cries on her first day of class. This is understandable; she needs to protect herself. Everything is new and unfamiliar. She may not see the point of being there or even fully realize she is hearing another language.

She adapts quickly, though. Our friendly teachers respect her cautiousness, but work hard to make the environment inviting and support her to feel comfortable. She is shown respect and begins to feel welcome. With trust gained with each lesson, she makes the choice to participate freely and class becomes something she looks forward to.

She begins to find fun in games, songs, books, and play with her teacher and classmates. She opens her mind to new ways of interacting and communicating and begins to let go of the comfort of using her native language. As the months pass, she decides to speak more and more English as she has fun, connects with her teacher and classmates, and gains experience expressing herself in her new language.

Each week, she encounters new things. She also finds challenges, struggles against them, and experiences successes. She leaves her comfort zone and enters new worlds again and again. She experiences temporary confusion but views it as a game, acting to solve these puzzles by her own effort, finding clarity, and growing in confidence.

She tries games her friends outside of class haven’t played, reads strange new books, and discovers more ways to read and write. She sings, dances, runs, draws, throws things, creates art, makes believe, and tries to figure things out. She thinks, notices patterns, and makes connections.

She feels free in a place of learning, not being compelled to sit unnaturally for long periods of time or do only what she’s been told. She has meaningful choices and discovers that joining her teacher and classmates in learning is fun.

Beyond the classroom

She participates in events where she can experience foreign cultural practices, make and eat new foods, try uncommon activities, and see the beauty of nature. She sees other teachers and many children like her learning English and feels part of a community. She has the support of older and more experienced students who speak English well, interacts with bilingual and talented adults who inspire in her new ideas of who she might become, and meets all kinds of children who communicate in English. She experiences what it’s like to hear only English for an entire day.

The months become years

As the years pass, communicating with diverse people and in a foreign language gradually becomes natural and normal. Learning and having fun are the same thing. New situations are adventurous. Rich memories from these years will remain with her throughout her life.

Having the ability to communicate fluently in a foreign language enables her to think in entirely new ways. With challenges and successes each week, each month, each year, she believes that even difficult problems are solvable and that she can be effective with her own efforts.

Her curiosity grows as she finds enjoyment in doing difficult things. She remains calm in facing uncertainty because her experience gives her confidence to think positively.

Her community grows

She gains experience negotiating difference. She discovers new people, mannerisms, phrases, words, gestures, and more that seem odd, baffling, or weird at first—but they become familiar and normal. She reads about, listens to, sees, and meets children from around the world, noticing how people live and act differently—then coming to realize that we all also have much in common. She comes to see racial and other differences as welcome highlights of a diverse global community. She will see both strangers and loved ones with an open and thinking mind, even in difficult times.

She builds a network of open-minded and talented people. She has connections to others who have worked hard like her to make a better life for themselves and their communities. She knows people living around Japan and in other countries. She has support to make even further connections beneficial to her studies, career, interests, and personal life.

Her understanding of English not only makes it easier for her to make foreign friends and travel independently, experiencing for herself the vast diversity of human existence and the wonders of our planet, it enables her to access massive amounts of information not available in her native language. She will carry this resource into adulthood for every purpose she wishes.

Foreign language and the self

In turn, her native language ability flourishes because she has used and thought about different systems of communication, variant notions of meaning, and alternative approaches to idea formation. She has the capacity to choose from more modes of communication for higher efficacy. This ability to think in new ways further enables her to achieve a deeper understanding of self.

Her years of detecting language patterns becomes an ingrained skill of pattern recognition, both for true and false patterns, that applies to all areas in life.

The sympathy and awareness of others along with appreciation of differences that she develops helps her grow beyond her family, local community, and nation, and into cosmopolitanism and acceptance of her citizenship in the world.

Beginning with the end in mind

Begin with understanding who you want to become and from there you can figure out which paths to take on your journey forward. With determination and proper guidance, resources, and community, anyone can learn a foreign language. As a parent, you can provide this gift which gives so much more. We help make it real.