Local preschool helps with global learning

A minute’s walk from Bryan Park, Sierra Roussos swung open the door of her house on the corner, welcoming a mother and child into another world.

“Bonjour!” she greeted them with a smile.

“Hello,” the mother replied as she nudged her child through the door.

The girl with bright eyes then ran to her. In one swooping motion, the preschool teacher picked up the 20-month-old and placed her on her hip.

“Au revoir!” a tiny Mia Makris yelled to her family, extending an arm and shaking her open hand back and forth.

“Au revoir, Mia,” they said as they exited through the door, laughing. She watched the family leave, her gentle, singsong voice repeating the French goodbye.

Roussos set the blond girl down, and she scurried off to find a toy. Sierra’s eyes focused on her.

“She’s really picking the language up fast.”

Just the other day, Mia said “encore” to her mother at the dinner table. She wanted more pasta, and the French word came to mind.

Those are the kinds of moments Sierra Roussos, a 2001 IU graduate, and her husband, Daniel, work so hard to see.

Those are the moments that help separate their preschool –  Bryan Park Preschool for Global Children – from others in Bloomington.

Sierra Roussos, 31, and Daniel Roussos, 37, spend 11 hours a day at the school and nursery, following a dual-language model and serving homemade and organic meals. They opened the preschool out of their home last January.

Sierra dreams of someday moving to a center and opening a pre-K through high school in town.

But for now, the children thrive in the Roussos’ home.

Multilingual from age 2

It was 8 a.m. and already a pair of 3-year-old boys began to argue.

“Are you two fighting?” Sierra Roussos dropped to her knees and looked them square in the eyes.

“No,” they responded in unison.

“I hope not. This is a violence-free school. No fighting, no guns, no swords,” she said matter-of-factly, her eyebrows raised but her voice the same singsong tone as before.

The parents who entrust the Roussos with their children recognize Sierra Roussos’s ability to keep her cool.

“Sierra appears to treat all the children with the same respect and kindness, while maintaining a firm and leadership-type role as a teacher,” Mia’s mother Beky Makris said. “She is very tuned in to their needs, and appears to be constantly evolving to accommodate ages, cultural identities and personal interests.”

As the kids lingered eating their breakfasts of organic yogurt, cereal and bananas, Sierra Roussos tried to push them along.

“Tu as fini?” she asked the kids at the table who were playing with their food. It means “Have you finished?” in French.

A 2-year-old just nodded, her wispy blond curls bouncing with her head.

Sierra Roussos and her children speak French as much as English throughout the day at Bryan Park Preschool. It’s part of the partial immersion system the couple believes best teaches a child another language. The Roussos don’t believe in the “foreign language classes” other schools offer. In their eyes, 45 minutes twice a week just doesn’t cut it.

Their preschool was created out of frustration at the selection of schools available for their children in Brooklyn a couple years ago. Daniel Roussos, with his background in business, and Sierra Roussos, with her expertise in foreign language education,
realized they could create their ideal preschool themselves. They would focus on world culture and foreign language.

“There have been studies that show children who study foreign language have better critical thinking skills, problem solving skills – they do better on standardized tests, they know their own language better,” she said. “A foreign language is a means of broadening a horizon.”

Sierra Roussos earned her bachelor’s degree in education from IU and her master’s from New York University, specializing in teaching French. She, too, learned at a young age – she spent four years as a child attending an elementary school in Paris while living with her grandparents.

But French and English words aren’t the only ones echoing through the walls of the household. Daniel Roussos, born in Beirut and raised in Greece, speaks, reads and writes in German and Greek fluently and is conversationally fluent in Arabic. However, Greek is his chosen language when talking to their 15-month-old daughter and 3-year-old son. Sierra Roussos speaks mainly French.

So how do the Roussos children learn English?

“Well, we speak English to each other,” she said, referring to herself and her husband.
As far as learning a language goes, the younger the better, Sierra  Roussos firmly believes.

No food is ‘yucky’

Throughout the morning, Daniel Roussos mainly stayed in the kitchen. The sunlight peeped through the trees into the window. Breaded turkey sizzled in the oven; organic pasta boiled on the stove.

It’s his job to provide the kids with the right nutrition, and he takes it seriously.
“Everything we cook is organic,” he said. “All the meat is local. If we don’t find something local, we don’t buy it.”

Going along with the theme of the school, Daniel Roussos serves dishes from around the world to introduce the children to other cultures.

Sometimes he’ll cook beeftekia, a Greek dish made of beef, pork, chopped onions, pepper, salt and parsley. Other times he’ll cook German bratwurst. That day it was a colorful dish of tricolor pasta with chunks of the breaded turkey and corn and steamed carrots on the side.

Sometimes it’s a struggle to convince kids younger than five to try unfamiliar foods, Daniel Roussos said.

“They all use the word ‘yucky.’ This is how they all start. It took me about six months to get rid of the word ‘yucky,’” he said. “We want them to learn the language and get acquainted with different types of food. We want them to try new things.”

Preschool hustle and bustle

On a rainy day, the kids at the preschool released their energy through dancing.

Sierra turned on global rhythmic music and cleared the play area. She plopped a box full of scarves down onto the mat.

Eleven kids hopped around. They ran into each other like bumper cars and collapsed on the ground.

Two boys draped an arm around each other’s necks and kicked their legs out in attempted synchronization. Their free hands twirled scarves.

They called for Sierra Roussos, who was speaking with a parent.

“Oh, you’re Greek dancing!” she exclaimed. The Roussos’ 3-year-old had learned the dance at a Greek festival a few months ago and shared it with his friends at the school.

The boys’ faces turned red from laughter as they fell to the ground, panting.
Sierra Roussos’ life revolves around kids. After 6 p.m., when the preschoolers go home, she turns into a full-time mom.

“Sometimes on the weekend I’m like, someone take my kids, I need to spend time with adults,” she said.

But most of the time she enjoys the constant company of bustling, energetic children.
When playtime drew to an end, it was back to work.

“OK, finish up ... we’ve got things to do,” Sierra crooned in her same gentle tone, as she turned to tend to another group of children.