Of course our friends up in Canada have a different school system to contend with (and decades of strong immersion programs in French and English to point to) but it’s still interesting for folks in the United States to look at how parents can organize to push for Mandarin immersion in their schools.
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http://www.mandarinforbcschools.org/
Welcome to MandarinForBCSchools.org! This website was created by parents for parents to share information about bilingualism and to help bring a K-12 Mandarin bilingual education program to our public school system. We are presently three parent groups, located in North and West Vancouver, Vancouver, Tri-Cities, Burnaby and Richmond. If you would like to give your child the gift of bilingualism, join us!
You can see their meet up page here.
Seated in a folding chair in the middle of Chinatown’s historic West Plaza, seven-year-old Aidan Garner’s short legs dangled his little feet above the ground as a concentrated expression washed over his face. He dipped a calligraphy brush almost as long as his whole arm into a bowl of black paint, and meticulously copied a series of connected lines from the paper beside him onto the newspaper in front of him. As an American-born, second-grade student, Garner had just done something that most American adults will never be able to do: he had written the Mandarin Chinese character for ‘moon cake’. As his mother looked proudly over his shoulder smiling, Garner declared, “I’m writing Chinese, it’s fun and easy!”
