FAIRFAX, Va. — The first-graders in Grace Yuan's class were playing "Jeopardy," eagerly responding to clues about animals and their habitats, diet and movements.

Sound routine for a group of 7-year-olds? Well, look again. These clues were in Chinese.

One girl, a bit uncertain, pondered the Chinese characters and pictures of animals. "Believe in yourself, Rachel," a classmate yelled. Applause rang out when she gave the correct response.

The class is a result of the National Security Language Initiative, introduced by President Bush in 2006 to teach the youngest students Chinese and other critical foreign languages.

"We're going to teach our kids how to speak important languages," he said. One goal, he added, is "to advance America's interests around the world, and defeat this notion about our, you know, our bullying concept of freedom by letting people see what we're about."

At Providence Elementary School here in Fairfax, principal Joy Hanbury believes that learning Chinese will stand today's children in good stead.

"We are looking at how global our world is," she said.

The emphasis on "critical needs" languages includes Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Hindi and Farsi.

The Education Department, one of four federal agencies involved in the program, has awarded 88 grants totaling about $26 million to communities around the country to expand instruction in these languages, beginning in kindergarten.

Chinese, thus far, has been the most popular.

"People understand in a competitive world you've got to be fluent in the languages where business is booming, and China is one of those places," said Holly Kuzmich, the Education Department's deputy chief of staff.

Studies have shown that young children are often much quicker than adults to pick up foreign languages. Other research suggests that elementary school students performed better in other subjects if they also took a foreign language.

"We do have pretty compelling data that show there are really good reasons to put in good programs at the elementary level," said Marty Abbott of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Fairfax County now offers Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Latin and Italian, in addition to the more traditional Spanish and French. Arabic and Chinese were selected by parents, primarily to give their kids a future economic edge, said Paula Patrick, foreign language coordinator for the county schools.

The county is using the nearly $622,000 grant it received through the National Security Language Initiative in part to train teachers in those two languages.

Grace Belyea, 7, is a first-grader at Providence Elementary and a student of Chinese. "I like counting and I like doing activities on the smart board," she said.

Yuan demonstrates on a computer the individual strokes needed to write Chinese characters. She creates computer games, like the animal "Jeopardy" the children were playing.

"Games are a good teaching tool," she said. "It lets them feel Chinese is not like a boring language."

The children clearly enjoyed their version of "Jeopardy," displayed on a smart board. Hands flew up when it was time to pick players.

Later, Suzanna, 7, explained why she likes learning Chinese. "Maybe you can learn about China, because it's very far away," she said.

Yuan, a Taiwan native, intersperses language instruction with lessons about Chinese culture. And she works with the classroom teacher to support regular lessons: When the children learned about the food pyramid in regular class, for example, they also studied fruits in Chinese.

The Providence first-graders have two 30-minute Chinese classes each week. The county school board aims to have each student competent in at least two languages by the time they graduate from high school.

The Education Department believes there's room for foreign language instruction even as schools work to meet the math and reading requirements in the No Child Left Behind law.

"There are ways to integrate subjects into one another," Kuzmich said.

Under the federal initiative, grants help people with skills in key languages get required training and certification.