Gone are the days of boxy classrooms flooded with fluorescent lights.
New designs on the drawing board for proposed schools in the Houston area — and there are a lot of them thanks toupcoming bond referendums — are innovative and engaging. But plans for the new Chinese Mandarin Language Immersion Magnet School, slated for an 8-acre parcel on West Alabama Street in the Galleria area, look like nothing you’ve seen before.
You can get your kids to translate, but basically he’s saying that his wife is Chinese and her grandmother only speaks Chinese, and now he’s learned. His accent is horrible but his Chinese is actually pretty good.
Click the “post” link below to see the full interview:
FOR years, researchers in bilingualism have been touting striking findings about how bilingualism affects the brain. Two of the most memorable involve “executive control” and delayed dementia. With the first, bilinguals have shown that they are better able to focus on demanding mental tasks despite distractions. In other studies, it has been estimated that bilinguals see the onset of dementia, on average, about five years later than monolinguals do.
This week comes new evidence* for the pile: researchers led by Roberto Filippi of Anglia Ruskin University have found that young bilingual pupils did a better job answering tricky questions with a noisy voice in the background than a monolingual control group did. The study was small (just 40 pupils, only 20 in each group). But its robustness is helped by the diversity of the bilinguals, who spoke Italian, Spanish, Bengali, Polish, Russian and others in addition to English. The experimenters tried to distract the pupils with random unrelated recordings in English (which all the pupils spoke) and Greek (which none of them did). The bilinguals did significantly better at ignoring the Greek distraction. (They did just a bit better with the English one.)
Elementary students in Broadway’s dual-language, Mandarin & English Program receive a rigorous education in language arts, social studies, mathematics, and sciences in adherence with the Common Core State Standards. Students receive instruction across all subject areas in both English and Mandarin for equal parts of the day. Fluency in either English or Mandarin is required for incoming Kindergarten and 1st Grade students. Prior exposure to Mandarin is not required. The Mandarin Immersion Program is currently offered for Grades K-3, expanding by one grade level each year. Broadway’s Mandarin Immersion Program is operated under the direction of Principal, Susan Wang and is located in Los Angels, CA. Learn more: http://www.broadwayelementary.org/mi
Student rendition of Let It Go in Mandarin Chinese.
Community members who want to know how a proposed Mandarin immersion charter school could affect the Menlo Park City School District asked lots of questions but learned there are still a lot of unknowns involved in the answers at a meeting on Thursday (Oct. 9) at Oak Knoll School in Menlo Park.
A group of about 50 people met at Oak Knoll School in Menlo Park to hear district Superintendent Maurice Ghysels, district board President Joan Lambert, and board member Maria Hilton talk about what they know, and don’t know, about the proposal.
A public hearing on the proposal will be held at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14, at Encinal Elementary School’s Multi-Use Room, 195 Encinal Ave. in Atherton.
Monica Arbeláez works with Sawyer Hunter in her kindergarten class at Jeffreys Grove Elementary School in Raleigh on Wednesday. Students in kindergarten and first grade at Jeffreys Grove take all of their core subjects in Spanish. PHOTOS BY ETHAN HYMAN — ehyman@newsobserver.com |Buy Photo
LANGUAGE IMMERSIONImmersion programs, in which students spend half or more of their school day taking their courses in a foreign language, are rising in popularity. According to Wake County school officials, there were 77 immersion programs in North Carolina public and private schools last school year.
Jeffreys Grove Elementary offers a Spanish full immersion program and Stough Elementary offers a Mandarin full immersion program. This means students in the program take their core courses – language arts, math, social studies and science – solely in that language.
Hodge Road Elementary offers a dual immersion Spanish program, meaning students alternate taking their core courses in Spanish and English.
School administrators want to magnetize Daniels Middle School and Broughton High School so that the Stough and Jeffreys Grove students can continue their studies and other students can take global studies classes. No recommendation has been made yet on where to send the Hodge Road students.
RALEIGH — A plan to expand Wake County’s magnet school program is drawing complaints that the development is a case of school leaders favoring older, established neighborhoods in Raleigh.
School administrators want Jeffreys Grove and Stough elementary schools in Raleigh and Hodge Road Elementary School in Knightdale to become magnet schools so that families across the district can attend the language immersion programs at the schools. But administrators also want Daniels Middle School and Broughton High School in Raleigh to become magnet schools to create a K-12 immersion/global studies theme.
Critics question magnetizing Broughton and Daniels, both of which are located near Cameron Village and serve some of Raleigh’s most affluent neighborhoods.
“Wake County is pandering to the wealthy inside-the-Beltline families,” said Allison Backhouse, an Apex parent and critic of the school board. “They’re going to use taxpayer money to keep the children of the wealthy.”
I know it can sometimes seem the only place I post about is Utah. But dear heavens, they are really the place in the country that’s doing immersion the most intensively. This is just one town, with a population of 87,461, and it’s got eight immersion elementary schools. That’s more than some states!
Canyons district taking dual immersion program application
Deseret News
Published: Thursday, Oct. 2 2014 2:46 p.m. MDT
Updated: yesterday
I know it sometimes seem the only place I post about is Utah
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 