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HAY RIVER - A Hay River woman has been working for several months to establish a private bilingual preschool daycare in the community.

Marla Mateus-Chasse: teacher gauging public interest in her plan to create a bilingual daycare in Hay River, which would be named Little Panda Day Care French Education. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

Marla Mateus-Chasse is hoping to establish Little Panda Day Care French Education (or Garderie Francaise Petit Panda, as it would be known in French), to offer French instruction in the morning and English in the afternoon.

"This is a dream that I've had for a long time," said the 50-year-old.

However, she needs to know if enough parents in Hay River want the bilingual daycare to make it a viable home business. So far there has been insufficient response to advertising, but she believes that may be because many people are away on vacation.

Eight children need to be registered for the daycare to open in the spacious basement of her home.

Mateus-Chasse will wait for responses until mid-August, and, if there are enough children registered, she plans to start the daycare in the first week of September.

If she decides to go ahead with the daycare, Mateus-Chasse would leave her current position teaching French immersion to students in Kindergarten and Grade 1 at Joseph Burr Tyrrell Elementary School in Fort Smith, where she has worked for four years.

"I love it there," she said.

However, she wants to work in Hay River, where she has a home, for health and family reasons, noting she drives a round trip between Hay River and Fort Smith every weekend during the school year.

"Life is short and I want to enjoy it," she said.

She noted she has always told her own teenage children to never give up on their dreams, and she does not want to give up on her dream.

"If the mom gives up on the dream, then what kind of example am I to my children?" she said.

Mateus-Chasse believes every parent has the right to have their children receive education in both French and English.

"I'm offering them that opportunity," she said.

She added the daycare would be both for families which have the right to send their children to Ecole Boreale, the French-language school in Hay River, and those who are not right-holders.

Her daycare would offer an academic program to teach such things as numbers and colours, she said. "I'm teaching them how to read."

The learning would be done through such methods as songs, games and theatre.

Mateus-Chasse would start with the assumption that children would enter the daycare without knowing how to speak any French.

"I believe the child is able to speak more than one language," she said. "That's a fact."

She noted it's a wonderful sense of accomplishment to give a child another language after just a year of instruction.

"To be able to do that is incredible. It's amazing and I love that feeling," she said.

Mateus-Chasse, who is originally from Montreal, speaks five languages – English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian.

She also has 25 years of teaching experience, including time at Ecole Boreale and Harry Camsell School in Hay River.

The daycare, which would be for children aged 2-4 years, already has funding arranged from the Department of Education, Culture and Employment.

It would be named after a panda mascot – called Phillippe – which Mateus-Chasse has used for 10 years, beginning in an Alberta school.

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