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Students at Beaverton’s newest public charter school will spend most of their days this fall reading, writing and singing in Chinese. 

Hope Chinese Charter School, housed inside Korean Mission Church in Cedar Hills, will open in September with kindergarten and first grade. Organizers plan to teach three-quarters of the school day in Chinese and the rest in English.

The school’s founders, a group of parents and educators, expect to add a grade level each school year, eventually reaching eighth grade.

Much remains to be done before the fledgling school can open Sept. 4. Church meeting rooms, which are being converted into classrooms, need bulletin boards and books. Walls need fresh paint.

Please read more here.

Legacy of dance grant will live on

• Perpich Center for the Arts grant went to LILA in FL

LILA teachers Raul Arroyo (Minneapolis), Jenni Muras (Hugo), Fred Moreno (Oakdale), Claire Gilbert (Forest Lake) and Jade Hibbard (White Bear Lake) enthusiastically demonstrate the five elements of dance: body, action, space, tempo, and energy. LILA developed Spanish curriculum materials as part of the Perpich Center dance grant. (Photo submitted)

It’s Monday morning at Lakes International Language Academy, a Spanish and Mandarin Chinese language immersion public elementary school in Forest Lake.

“Attention, attention, Lilavision will begin in one minute,” blares over the loudspeakers in Spanish, prompting students to turn on their classroom televisions for the student-produced morning news.

First is an announcement inviting students to an upcoming family dance night with an international “Carnaval” theme. A later video shows four students dancing to the music of a Native American chant. The student announcers explain that the performers choreographed the dance themselves.

In a fifth grade classroom, students applaud and make plans to use the gym during recess to create their own dance. Afterwards, their teacher leads them in a morning meeting activity. Students create actions to represent natural disasters and the class combines them into movement sequences. Dance making and movement have become student-led and commonplace at LILA.

Please read more here.

As the presidential candidates battle over U.S.-Mexico immigration policy, a sweeping new survey shows that Asian Americans have overtaken Latinos nationally as the largest group of new immigrants arriving each year in the United States – a development with profound political and economic implications.

Not only are Asian Americans the fastest-growing racial group in the country, but they have the highest incomes, are the best-educated and are happier with their lot in life compared with other groups, according to “The Rise of Asian Americans,” a comprehensive new Pew Research Center survey and report being released Tuesday.

“It is a reversal of fortune for Asian Americans,” said David Lee, a longtime community organizer in San Francisco’s Asian American neighborhoods who teaches political science at San Francisco State University.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/06/18/MN1C1P3SUF.DTL#ixzz1yGAt5Z12

2012 Heritage Language Teacher Workshop

Workshop Dates: July 16-20, 2012

The StarTalk sponsored languages are:
Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Turkish and Urdu.

Instructors from K-16 programs and community schools are invited to apply.

Additional spaces are available for other less commonly taught languages.

The workshop is sponsored by Startalk and the National Heritage Language Resource Center and cosponsored by the UCLA Asia Institute and the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.

About the Workshop

This workshop is designed to help language teachers face the challenge of teaching heritage language students. It will prepare them to understand the differences between teaching L2 and HL learners, the issues involved in heritage language teaching, and how to address them. Participants will explore ways to design their own curriculum and select materials and assessment tools. They will learn how to involve students as ACTIVE participants in the learning process. The five Cs recommendations from the National Standards will be implemented throughout the workshop.

The workshop will include information on how to research a heritage language community and create a community-based program. A grasp of demographic data will give teachers an advantage in both teaching and promoting heritage language instruction in their own departments, institutions, and districts. The workshop will address these issues to better prepare teachers for the classroom.

The workshop hopes to develop a cohort of language teachers who will be leaders and mentors in the field of heritage language instruction.

The workshop’s goals are:

1.Understand the differences and similarities between L2 and HL teaching, including assessment.

1. Set goals for HL instruction that differ from objectives for L2 programs.
2. Design a curriculum that takes students’ initial proficiencies into account.
3. Incorporate knowledge of the community including use of demographic tools in curricular design and materials development.
4. Incorporate National Foreign Language Standards and California Standards for World Languages into teaching.

There is no charge for this workshop. A limited number of stipends will be available to cover travel and accommodations for out of state participants.

For additional information, contact kathryn@humnet.ucla.edu

Posted: Tuesday, June 5, 2012 2:31 pm

By KEVIN HEIMBIGNER kheimbigner@chinookobserver.com | 0 comments

The ability to speak more than one language is an asset to the individual, the community in which that person lives, and the world at large. Many adults who know only one language often lament the fact that they never had an opportunity to learn another language. But monolingualism can be cured! In fact, all over Utah, Dual Language Immersion (DLI) programs are doing just that.

Sponsored and promoted by the Utah State Office of Education (USOE), these DLI programs begin in 1st grade and are offered in Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. DLI programs are predominantly in public schools; they teach the Utah Core. The beauty is that children in a DLI program learn academic content in two languages. They spend half the day learning part of their content in English, and half the day learning other content in the target language. A DLI program does not require the hiring of more teachers. Two classes share two teachers: one class spends the morning with the English-speaking teacher and the afternoon with the target-language-speaking teacher, while the other class follows the reverse order. USOE offers financial support in the form of curriculum and materials ($10,000 per program per year) as well as training for teachers.

Schools in Utah have been offering DLI programs since 2006; by the beginning of next school year, there will be 80 such programs. The governor and USOE have a goal of 100 DLI programs in operation by the year 2015. DLI programs are always a choice within a school; no one is forcing parents to send their children to a DLI program. But many parents are eager to have this unique opportunity for their children. In fact, most DLI programs have a waiting list.

Why are there no DLI programs in Cache Valley, even though many schools in Utah have them, including both a Spanish and a Mandarin program in Brigham City? Because parents have not made their wishes known to the school boards persistently enough. Please watch the “Utah Dual Immersion” video on YouTube or on the USOE website. See if this is something you would want for your child. If you wish to join the efforts to convince the Logan and/or Cache County School Districts to begin offering a DLI program, please talk to the principal at your neighborhood school and the school board members of your district. Also, please join the Facebook page “Cache Valley Parents for Dual Language Immersion.” I have no doubt that DLI programs will eventually come to Cache Valley, but it is up to the stakeholders — namely, parents of preschoolers — to make it happen.

Karin deJonge-Kannan

Logan

From:

http://news.hjnews.com/opinion/article_caffa888-9ecd-11e1-857a-001a4bcf887a.html