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…

This great memo went out from the principal at public elementary school Mandarin immersion program just before school began this year Anyone who’s spent time in an MI program as a parent or staff will recognize the issues the school has faced. It’s hard to keep good teachers, especially highly sought-after Mandarin teachers. That’s even…

The West County Mandarin School in Richmond, Calif. is an interesting case. The West Contra Costa Unified School District (north of Berkeley) started the program in part to forestall a charter school being created. Parents in the district, and nearby, had asked for a Mandarin immersion program but the districts hadn’t wanted to do one. Then a…

I include this because so many of us in Mandarin immersion programs deal with an ongoing series of tweaks and changes from our school districts, administrators and teachers. Sometimes there are unintended consequences that no one expected. Cambridge, Mass. is dealing with some of those now. From Cambridge Day By Jean Cummings Monday, October 9,…