Get your school’s new parents ready for Mandarin immersion

As incoming Kinder parents begin to think about how this Mandarin immersion thing they’ve signed up for is actually going to work, many programs around the nation are getting them a copy of A Parent’s Guide to Mandarin Immersion as a one-stop reading guide to language immersion.

Both schools and parent associations have purchased copies for their new parents, or as a sale item to support their programs. The books can be purchased in bulk much more cheaply than buying them through Amazon.

As a parent of two daughters who’ve been in Mandarin immersion programs at two different schools for a total of 17 years now, I wrote A Parent’s Guide as the how-to manual that I wished I’d had when we started this process.

Many schools have found that by giving copies of the book to parents early on (sometimes even before school starts) they can spend more time building a great school and less time explaining the nuts and bolts of immersion. Informed parents, teachers tell me, are calmer and more empowered parents.

A Parent’s Guide covers:

• How immersion works in the classroom
• The benefits of bilingualism for the brain
• Chinese 101 for immersion parents
• The academic possibilities immersion opens to students
• Chinese literacy issues
• The six types of Mandarin immersion families
• Why schools offer immersion
• How parents can turbo-charge their children’s Chinese

If you order 25 or more books, I can have them dropped shipped to your school for $12 a copy. If you order 50 or more they go down to $11 a copy. And, as one program did, if you buy 100 they go down to $10 per book.

Some PTAs have bought them and then sold them at the regular price of $18.95 as a fund raiser as well.

If your school is interested, please contact me at weise (at) well (dot) com