Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

From Friday’s Clare County Review:

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Farwell plans preschool, kindergarten program improvements

“Next year will prove to be an exciting year for our elementary [school] as there are two big program improvements that are being planned now for implementation in September,” said Farwell Superintendent Dave Peterson.

Information about the new programs was accidentally run as a Clare School column in the April 30 issue of the Review.

The first program, called Universal Pre School, will allow enrollment of four-year-old students, “filling a void in our pre-school program,” said Peterson.

The second new program will be the implementation of Mandarin Chinese, a combined course of language and mathematics, in the kindergarten program. Two parent meetings will be held on May 18 about the new Mandarin language and math program, one at 5 p.m. and the second at 7 p.m. Parents will have until May 21 to sign up for the new program, Peterson said.

“In September, our kindergarten students will be greeted by a certified teacher from China. The foreign language teacher will deliver two different programs,” Peterson explained. Twenty-two kindergarten students will participate in an “immersion program,” being taught math while “immersed” in the Mandarin language.

“If you were to observe the math class for these children you would hear that nearly 100 percent of the language being used is Mandarin. The beauty of this is that the children are learning the second language while learning math.”

Read more here.