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.

I just had my second grader home sick for two days and she watched a lot of 5Q Channel and ChildRoad. They’re nice for when you want to give your kids an online or video treat but you’d like it to be something that is educational.

Here’s the latest release from 5Q Channel. ChildRoad.com has also been updating their site and they’ve added some nice functionality, including age ranges for some of the stories, which helps those of us who don’t read Chinese.

[Note – The MIPC doesn’t accept anything for free, so we bought and paid for all of these. These aren’t meant as ads but simply telling other parents what useful Chinese-related things we’ve found. If you’ve found something that engages your child in Chinese, please email so we can tell everyone else.]

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We have more apps on APP Store now.
Here are three new apps of 5QChannel.

1. Chinese Conjunctions 1
This one is our first app made for Chinese learners.
The icon’s color is orange.
It’s free for now, welcome you to download it from here :
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chinese-conjunctions-1/id433567805?mt=8
Simplified Chinese

2. The Frog Borrowed a Drum from The Snake
Promo code : MK3TYXAPYYYK

Simplified Chinese

3. Qingming Festival
Promo code : LJMEWFWAYLET
Simplified Chinese

Best regards,

Tseng Jr-Shi
http://www.5qchannel.com

A Forest Lake charter school will begin offering a Mandarin Chinese immersion program next year.

Lakes International Language Academy, also known as LILA, has traditionally offered only full Spanish immersion classes for its 600 students. But its founders kept the school name as a “language academy” for the opportunity to expand.

The Chinese program will be offered to kindergartners next school year, the board of directors decided recently.

The school has held Chinese New Year celebrations and hosted Chinese exchange students. It also held Chinese elective classes for students in first through third grades since opening.

Parents founded the Lakes International Language Academy in 2004 after school board members rejected a proposal to start an immersion program in the district.

In recent years, Lakes International has helped the Forest Lake Public School district start a Spanish immersion program of its own, and they have collaborated on teaching strategies. And the school has floated the idea of becoming a “site-based” school that would be funded by the Forest Lake Public Schools but be run by its parents and teachers.

In immersion programs, students are taught regular subjects, such as math and geography, in a language other than their native language.

Lakes International will host an information session, including a building tour, for interested families on Wednesday, May 11 from 9-10:30 a.m. For more information, visit www.lakesinternational.org or call 651-464-0771.

Article here.

Township resident Yanbin Ma is among a group of area residents who have applied to start the Hanyu International Academy, one of two Mandarin Immersion charter schools that could accept Millburn students in fall 2012. The schools would charge no tuition, but would receive 90 percent of the average per-pupil costs from the local public school districts.

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Ma, who is President of the Millburn–Short Hills Chinese Association, said he and others were looking for options to teach their children Chinese. Beyond private school, weekend classes and short-lived after school programs, the choices they found were scarce.

“We want our kids to know Chinese, to read and write Chinese when they grow up,” he said.

Ma says the language offerings in the public schools are not commensurate with the growing Asian population. He said he and other Millburn parents gained the support of former language supervisor Adrienne Tator in pushing for Chinese education at the elementary and middle school levels, but the effort did not go further. The only time Chinese is taught is at the AP level in high school.

Read more here.