Learner Spotlight – Kalea Hoshi

Kalea Hoshi is a kindergartener with iLEAD Exploration. She is growing up in a multilingual home in Los Angeles and speaks English, French and Japanese. She also understands Portuguese and will learn Spanish in the future!

Kalea loves books and is learning to read in English and French. She’s currently working on a science unit about bees and is reading about them in French. Kalea and her sisters are Brazilian, French and Japanese and her parents are doing an amazing job teaching Kalea and her sisters about those languages and cultures. They value multilingual education because it gives their girls a connection to their diverse heritage, and research has shown its tremendous benefits to brain development.

In addition to the language skills she learns at home, Kalea takes French classes at a local school and will start Japanese classes when she’s older. She’s traveled to France twice, and will visit Japan for the first time this spring.

Kalea loves to be active and takes classes in dance, acrobatic dance and gymnastics. She also loves snowboarding and can’t wait to go again this winter. She’s learning sewing, woodworking, and gardening at 4-H and applying some of those skills at home by helping to sew buttons back on her sister’s clothing.