I won’t be attending this conference but would love to run reports from any parents, teachers or principals who are. If you’d like to be a correspondent, email me.
Beth
|
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council
Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education
recent posts
- Newly-updated Mandarin immersion school list for 2026
- Where Language Meets Opportunity: Inside an Arizona Mandarin Immersion Program
- California schools that need foreign workers for teacher jobs can’t afford new visa fee
- A look at an Australian Mandarin immersion school
- British Columbia’s Mandarin immersion program to be cut
about
-
-
I post these not to frustrate those who *don’t* live in Orange County, but rather so you can see the sorts of places that tend to put together these kinds of summer camps. For those in areas where Mandarin immersion is fairly new and summer activity camps haven’t gotten started yet, this could give you a sense of the types of businesses that might run these programs. Often if you reach out to them and explain that there’s a cohort of kids coming whose parents really want real immersion activities in the summer, they’re happy to create them. Knowing that their local school will soon be producing 20 or 40 kids a year whose families want Mandarin in the summer is a big draw.
It can be very simple. For example there’s a jewelry designer in San Francisco who happens to speak Mandarin. She created a summer program where kids get together to make jewelry and it’s all done in Mandarin.
Culture and language camps for children
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
A Little Dynasty Chinese School
•Ages: 4-teens
A Little Dynasty chinese School in Irvine offers classes for kids of all ages.ADVERTISEMENT•9844 Research Drive, Irvine
•949-509-0288
A Little Dynasty’s summer camp is a Chinese language-immersion camp that gives campers a study-abroad experience without leaving the country.
Fondazione Italia-Italian Summer Camp
•Ages: 4-13
•Heritage Christian School, 22882 Loumont Drive, Lake Forest
•310-739-9350
Students will practice Italian language and arts, outdoor games, crafts, music, dance and cooking. Three camps by age: 4-6, 7-10 and 10-13.
Please read more here.
-
- By MORGAN McLAUGHLIN / FOR THE REGISTER
Dice flew and chips piled up as guests in traditional 旗袍 Chinese brocade dresses and shirts whooped it up at the 2nd annual Friends of MIP (Mandarin Immersion Program) Chinese New Year Fundraiser Celebration. The Bowers Museum in Santa Ana turned casino for one night, and supporters of the Capistrano Unified School District’s MIP, a two-year-old program at Marian Bergeson Elementary, netted $59,000 by playing craps and blackjack and bidding on an array of live and silent auction items.
Patina Group served a three-course dinner, and guests participated in a heads and tails game. The festivities supported an important cause, said Audrey Shaw of Laguna Niguel, vice president of the Friends of MIP advisory board.
Tables awaited guests at the Friends of the Mandarin Immersion Program ‘s Chinese New Year gala at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana.MORGAN MCLAUGHLIN, FOR THE REGISTERBy the numbers115+ : companies and individuals that donated items for the fundraiser
175: Guests who attended the event
$500: amount donated every time someone closes a loan with Emery Financial and mentions MIP
The Friends of MIP will host an Orange County Spring Rummage Sale on May 4 from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Marian Bergeson Elementary, 25302 Rancho Niguel Road, Laguna Niguel.
“This is a global economy. Our kids need to be successful,” she said. “The money we raised last year gave us aides for each classroom … this year we want to make it the best program possible.”
Please read more here.
-
From the Asia Society. Jamila Nightingale is doing great work here in the San Francisco Bay area to support African-American families with children in Mandarin immersion programs. I strongly encourage schools to reach out to Parents of African American Students Studying Chinese (PASSC) to talk about creating groups in your own schools and districts. San Francisco’s very successful Alice Fong Yu Cantonese Immersion school has long had a Black Student Union, for example. Our programs are often incorrectly seen as primarily for Asian and white families, but of course all children should benefit from the great advantage of being bilingual, and especially bilingual in Chinese. To do that, we’ve got to deal with some of the assumptions people have head on. Jamila’s work is helping all of us do that.
-Beth
=======
By Heather Clydesdale
“Parents, wait here.” In China, it is not uncommon for this message to be posted outside school entrances. By contrast, U.S. schools, in part because of strains caused by shrinking budgets, have flung their doors open for parent volunteers. This, coupled with a culture that lauds exhaustive parent involvement in children’s lives, can leave Chinese teachers can feeling drained and unsure about how to help parents advance students’ education.
Elizabeth Weise, founding member of the Mandarin Immersion Parents Council, and Jamila Nightingale, founder and director of Parents of African American Students Studying Chinese, frequently speak to audiences of Chinese language teachers and administrators, and share strategies for winning the support of parents and communities.
Weise, who has two daughters enrolled in language immersion classes and is writing a book aimed at parents, explains that mothers and fathers who have been absorbed by every moment of their children’s lives are jolted when their children enter a Chinese language program. Suddenly, “a curtain has come across six hours of their kid’s day. It is a black box. And if you don’t tell them what is happening, they’ll imagine it.”
Please read more here.
-
-
Proposition 227 all but eliminated bilingual education in California schools in 1998. The law mandated that English be used as the primary language to teach non-English-speaking kids in schools. In recent years, a different form of secondary language acquisition has been gaining traction in Los Angeles public school system. They are called “dual language immersion” programs: classes are taught almost entirely in Spanish, Mandarin or another language, and they are designed to benefit both children who are learning English as a second language as well as those who are native English speakers.KPCC’s Early Childhood Development Correspondent Deepa Fernandes has a piece today looking at one such program at Foster Elementary School in Baldwin Park. School officials there, mirroring what many researchers have found, say that kids in their dual language programs outperform those who are taught in just English-only classes.
If dual language immersion programs are so successful, why aren’t more California schools adopting them? What are some of the challenges and drawbacks? What are the benefits?
Guests:
Karen Cadiero-Kaplan, Director of the English Learner Support Division at the California Department of EducationRoger Lowenstein, founder and executive director of Los Angeles Leadership Academy, a public charter school in Lincoln Heights that practices dual language immersion
Karen Nemeth, co-founder of Language Castle. She is a dual language immersion consultant who works with school districts across the the country
Please read and listen here.
-
LAFAYETTE — It will take some “seed money” to get a proposed immersion high school off the ground in Lafayette, but just how much is still unknown, said members of a committee studying what it would take to open the Lafayette school.The committee’s work is outlined in Act 851, authorized by the Legislature in 2012. The legislation created an exploratory committee to examine the feasibility of opening an immersion high school in Lafayette in 2014-15 with French as the primary language and Spanish and Mandarin Chinese as other language options.
Please read more here.
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 