Multilingual approach to Bellevue School District workshop

Parents who speak five different languages will lead discussion groups in those languages during a Bellevue School District workshop on raising children on Monday.

It's the first time Bellevue has tried to conduct a workshop in many different languages besides English, said Ann Oxrieder, assistant to the superintendent.

Speaker James Mazza, professor and director of the School Psychology Program at the University of Washington, will discuss — in English — the importance of teaching coping skills to children.

During his lecture, slides with key points of the speech, translated into Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Vietnamese, will be shown to speakers of those languages.

Afterward, parents speaking the five languages will lead follow-up workshops. There will be English-language workshops as well.

More than 80 different languages are spoken by students attending Bellevue schools, Oxrieder said.

The workshop, which is free, will be at Sammamish High School, 100 140th Ave. S.E., Bellevue. Information booths will open at 6:30 p.m. and stay open until 9 p.m. The keynote speech will begin at 7 p.m., and workshops will start about 7:45 p.m.