“Things I Wish I’d Known:  Current Mandarin immersion parents offer up
what they’ve learned to incoming MI families”

Tuesday, May 24, 2011
6:00-7:30 PM
Jose Ortega Elementary School (in the library)
400 Sargent Street
San Francisco

At this meeting of the Mandarin Immersion Parents Council, current MI parents from Jose Ortega and Starr King will answer questions and generally offer advice to families who have just gotten into Mandarin immersion.  Bring your questions!  Topics can include where to buy uniforms, how lunches work, and what to expect when your child comes home that first week exhausted from a new school and new friends.  If your family speaks Mandarin at home, perhaps you have questions about what your child will be learning and what kind of support is available for English language learners.

We’ll also have copies of the MI FAQ: Everything you always wanted to know about Mandarin immersion in the San Francisco Public Schools but didn’t know who to ask.  We look forward to meeting our new families.  (And if you’re wait listing for either Jose Ortega or Starr King, you’d be most welcome too!)

Childcare will be available at $10/child.  Dinner will be provided for kids.

Millburn Hosts Panel Discussion on Charter Schools

Princeton school officials among those talking about the cost of charter schools to school districts.

By Marilyn Joyce Lehren and Laura Griffin |  May 9, 2011

   

School leaders from four neighboring school districts gathered in Millburn on Monday night to learn more about charter schools – a divisive issue in New Jersey that now concerns even high-performing districts like Millburn, which is faced with two Mandarin-immersion charters seeking approval.

“It’s a storm and it’s a big storm now,” said Lynne Strickland, executive director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools. “And it’s not a perfect storm.”

Strickland was part of a panel brought together at Millburn High School to provide school boards from Millburn, Livingston, Union and South Orange-Maplewood with information to take back to their communities.

Millburn will follow up this meeting an agenda item for discussion by board members and the public at its May 23 meeting, said Superintendent Dr. James Crisfield.

School districts have until the end of May to respond to the New Jersey Department of Education with concerns and questions about applications filed by two Mandarin charters – Hanyu International Academy Charter School and Hua Mei Charter School.

Read more here.

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Four teachers at a special magnet school in Point Loma will have their pink slips rescinded.

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By Rory Devine

A reprieve this afternoon for a Mandarin Chinese immersion program in Point Loma, after 80 percent of their mandarin teachers were given pink slips.

When pink slips were first handed out to teachers, there was much concern about the future of this five-year-old magnet program. Concern, after four of the five teachers who teach Mandarin Chinese there were issued pink slips.

Now, it looks like those lay off notices will be rescinded.

Sally Lowe was one of those told she could be laid off from her job at the Barnard Mandarin Chinese Magnet School. Despite 15 years of teaching experience, she has only four years with San Diego Unified, so she has less seniority than other teachers in the District.

Source: Teachers’ Pink Slips Rescinded | NBC San Diego

Kylie Hwang reads in Korean to her second-grade class at Keppel Elementary School in Glendale. The Glendale Unified School District has become one of the nation’s leading laboratories for dual-language immersion, offering programs in Italian, German, Spanish, Armenian, Japanese and Korean. (Don Bartletti, Los Angeles Times)

In a Glendale public school classroom, the immigrant’s daughter uses no English as she conjugates verbs and writes sentences about cats.

More than a decade after California voters eliminated most bilingual programs, first-grader Sofia Checchi is taught in Italian nearly all day — as she and her 20 classmates at Franklin Elementary School have been since kindergarten.

Yet in just a year, Sofia has jumped a grade level in reading English. In the view of her mother — an Italian immigrant — Sofia’s achievement validates a growing body of research indicating that learning to read in students’ primary languages helps them become more fluent in English.

The Glendale Unified School District has become one of the nation’s leading laboratories for such dual-language immersion experiments, offering programs in Italian, German, Spanish, Armenian, Japanese and Korean. At Franklin, instruction is 90% in Italian and 10% in English in kindergarten and first grade, a proportion that will shift to 50-50 by fifth grade. Although Sofia is classified as an English-language learner, most of her classmates are native English speakers whose parents want them to learn Italian.

Growing in popularity, dual-language immersion programs are the new face of bilingual education —without the stigma. Though bilingual education was often perceived — and resented by some —as public handouts only for immigrant families, dual programs offer the chance to learn a second language to native-born American children as well.

read more here.

ASU Confucius Institute launches Chinese program in local schools

May 06, 2011

The Confucius Classrooms at Boulder Creek, Diamond Canyon and Gavilan Peak will have a joint Confucius Classrooms Celebration at 7:00 pm on Friday, May 6 at Boulder Creek High School.  Boulder Creek, Diamond Canyon and Gavilan Peak students will perform skits, songs, a drums and lion dance, and a ribbon dance.

The ASU Confucius Institute has partnered with several Arizona schools to establish the Confucius Classrooms that offer effective Chinese language and culture programs.  Confucius Classrooms are Chinese programs funded by Confucius Institute Headquarters/Hanban.

In 2010, Hanban gave awards to six Confucius Classrooms in three Arizona school districts: Diamond Canyon School, Gavilan Peak School, Boulder Creek High, Horseshoe Trails Elementary, Lone Mountain Elementary and Rhodes Junior High.

Both Gavilan Peak and Diamond Canyon offers students Mandarin instruction to all students from Kindergarten to eight grade.

The Confucius Classroom at Gavilan Peak also offers the first public school Mandarin Immersion program in Arizona.  Fifty-four first grade students are taught mathematics and science in Mandarin only. The Confucius Classroom at Boulder Creek will offer a Madarin Chinese course in the fall of 2011.  The Mandarin program at Boulder Creek will be part of a K-12 articluated course of study with two other Confucius Classroom Schools, Gavilan Peak and Diamond Canyon K-8 Schools.

This collaboration will allow Boulder Creek to expand its language offerings  and allow them to offer Advanced Placement courses in Mandarin within the next few years.

See story here.

Cherokee School Awarded Two Grants for New Mandarin Immersion Program

By Lake Forest School District 67 Yesterday at 11:37 a.m.

Cherokee Elementary School has been awarded two grants so far to help fund the district’s new Mandarin immersion program. The Spirit of 67 has generously committed $3,000 to purchase kindergarten and first grade materials written in Mandarin. The Illinois State Board of Education awarded $18,944 towards program planning and curriculum development.

Results of a third grant request for $10,000 from China are expected in September.

The District 67 Mandarin immersion program will offer one language immersion (Mandarin) kindergarten class and one first grade class beginning this coming fall.

The program will offer half-day instruction in English and half-day instruction in Mandarin through fourth grade. There has been significant research on the benefits of beginning world language instruction in the earliest grades and using an immersion method of instruction (the teacher uses the new language 70-100% of the time).

Why Mandarin? Some economists predict that China’s economy will surpass even the United States’ sometime in this decade. Yet, less than 5 percent of U.S. public schools have a Mandarin program. Mastering this language will set our Lake Forest graduates apart for college admission and future career opportunities.

Story here.

If you spend any time looking for books for your kids in Chinese, you’ll quickly run across the website or catalog for Cheng and Tsui, a Boston-based publisher and distributor of materials for learning Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

I just got their latest catalog and noticed that they’re marking certain books with a special note “Recently Adopted in OREGON.”

Congrats to the Portland’s Mandarin immersion program, the oldest public school Mandarin immersion program we know of, which is clearly seen as a trend setter. “It has name recognition, which is really key,” says Cheng and Tsui’s Megan Norlund. “When more established programs adopt some of our books, and tell other programs they’ve adopted them, it make a difference.”

The books, by the way, are the Flying with Chinese series with start in Kindergarten and are so far up to 5th grade.

Another note: Cheng and Tsui actually pronounces its name “Cheng and Soo-yee,” I found when I called.

And finally, Norlund says they’re working on books that will be interesting and readable for immersion students, but it’s still going to be a few years. We’ll keep you posted.