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Hi! Bonjour! ¡Hola! Oi!
My name is Laura Straube Tiago, founder and director of
Passport to Learning Language Immersion Center.
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I am an educator, a linguist, a mother, a wife, an academic, and a lover of literature and travel. I have 10 years of certified teaching experience of Spanish and French as a second language, a Master's degree in French from Saint Louis University with a graduate minor in Spanish, and Bachelor's degrees in both Spanish and French language and literature from Southern Illinois University of Edwardsville. I am a native speaker of English, professionally qualified in French and Spanish, and I have an intermediate proficiency in Portuguese. I am a doctoral student at Saint Louis University in the PhD in Curriculum and Instruction program with the goal of specializing in language immersion curriculum models and teacher education.
Passport to Learning Language Immersion Center is the merging of my professional, personal, and academic endeavors. With the birth of my youngest child, I realized again the need for more diverse early childhood programming in the area. Research consistently shows that the best time to acquire language is during childhood. With children spending many hours each week in childcare, those early years are the perfect time and opportunity for our little ones to learn an additional language. I am pleased to create a specialized and linguistically enriching program for the benefit of families and children in our area, including my own.
