February 28, 2020 marks the 15-year anniversary of the first class of 5 students that Sharon Huang held in her Maplewood home in 2005. As an international marketing executive and a mother of then 1-year old twins, Sharon understood the importance of global skills and the need to begin this learning as early as possible. Since…

The Asia Society’s Center for Global Education has a nice page of videos showing teachers teaching in Chinese classes across multiple grades. Even if you don’t speak Chinese, it gives you a flavor of what goes on in these classes, with some English commentary on the teaching interspersed. And if you’re a parent contemplating a…

From: The DC Line Feb. 3, 2020 When Vanessa Bertelli moved with her family from Shanghai to Washington in 2010, she was sure her children would have access to dual language education. It is, after all, the nation’s capital. A child of a bilingual family, Bertelli grew up in Switzerland speaking English and Italian, surrounded…

Whether your students are in school or doing school from home, the Moon Festival is almost upon us. For folks who didn’t grow up in families that celebrated what’s properly called the Mid-Autumn Festival, here’s a little background. The Moon Festival is a traditional celebration held on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month…

Washington D.C.’s Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School is an extraordinarily popular Mandarin immersion charter school in the city. For the 2020-2021 school year it had 62 seats available for 3-year-olds entering its preschool. The waitlist was 423 students long. By Kindergarten there are no seats available as they’re all taken up with the school’s…

Learning languagesWhy studying Chinese is in decline Mandarin is out of fashionAugust 29, 2020 The article is behind a paywall, so the link below might not work for most folks. The two most salient points are below. Which makes me curious — have your feelings about Mandarin immersion changed in the past few years? Feel…

Full disclosure: My daughter worked as a counselor at the Sky Kids camp in Taiwan last year.