Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

West meets East at Oakbrook

Published: Thursday, September 23, 2010

Oakbrook Elementary first-graders Mikayla Petroske and Miranda Smith practice math in Chinese with the help of teacher Yanbo Chen.

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By DEBRA KASZUBSKI

Recess, songs, snack, stories and … Chinese? That’s the case at Oakbrook Elementary School in Sterling Heights where kindergarten and first-grade students enrolled in the Partial Immersion Mandarin program are learning the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic in English and Chinese.

Partial Immersion students split their days in two classrooms, with half spent in the Western, or more traditional American, side and the second half in the Eastern classroom, where teachers speak only Chinese. They do not study the foreign language directly, but instead learn basics in the foreign tongue. There are a total of 89 kids learning Chinese at Oakbrook; some live outside the Oakbrook area.

“The kids pick up so quickly,” said Oakbrook Principal Brian Shepard. “It’s amazing how much they learn. It’s expected they will be fluent in the language.”

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