Beacon Hill school seeks to bridge language and cultural gap DECEMBER 21, 2017  By Jill Christensen NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY Barriers do not exist at Beacon Hill International Elementary School, both physically and culturally. With its open concept classroom style, Beacon Hill Elementary not only encourages cohesiveness through the layout of its classrooms, but it strives…

Students learn Mandarin or Spanish first, then English, at popular Denver public school English instruction is introduced gradually, beginning in third grade   Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post: Chinese teacher Yu-Hsin Lien, speaking only in Chinese, helps her 3rd grade students with classwork at the Denver Language School on Nov. 1, 2017 in Denver.  …

From Education Week May 31, 2017 12:51 PM Language immersion education is a relatively new field, so how can educators know if a program is effective? Shuhan Wang and Joy Kreeft Peyton, of Asia Society’s Chinese Early Language and Immersion Network (CELIN), consider this question and offer a checklist tool to allow program staff to…

I wanted to leave everyone with something fun for the holidays. If you’ve got additions, please email them to me. I’m always looking for new examples to add. You learned to belt out the entire chorus of “Gong Xi Gong Xi” or “Liang Zhi Lao Hu” long before you could say basic phrases in Chinese.…

  Read Judy Shei’s piece about moving to Singapore for work and then getting a spot in the local public school. Then check out this video from the New York Times Style Magazine. (In the interest of full disclosure, when our kids were taking part in poetry reading competitions with their classmates in grade school,…

I’d somehow missed this press, which specializes in easier-to-read books for middle-school and high school students who are learning Chinese. They’re called Imagin8 Press. They’ve got four books out now from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West (which many Mandarin immersion parents will simply know as “The Monkey King book.”) It’s written with just 600…

Thanks to Judy Shei for this helpful overview. A former San Francisco public school Mandarin immersion parent who’s now living in Singapore, her  perspective is great because she knows both what a U.S. school looks like but is now also an expert on the Singapore school system. By Judy Shei As an immigrant child, I…