Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

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  • SFUSD Mandarin Vocab Study Aid

    Jose Ortega parents have created laminated place mats of the San Francisco Unified School District Mandarin vocabulary. The placemats are 11″x17″ and come by grade level in sets of two — one mat has the Chinese characters only (for quizzing) and the second mat has the characters plus pinyin and English meanings (for study).
    The mats have the current vocabulary, but we don’t know whether the district will change the vocabulary again in the future, so you may not want to buy placemats that are more than one grade ahead. If the vocabulary does change, we will revise the placemats before we offer them for sale the next year.

    Games

    You can help making learning the characters fun by playing games with your placemats such as…

    Stump Me

    Stump Me
    • Choose a row or column of characters to play with and review it out loud.
    • Gather enough quarters or cut enough squares from construction paper to cover that row or column.
    • Cover up each square on the meanings mat.
    • Find the matching row on the characters-only mat and take turns pointing at a character for the next player to guess. You can designate Chinese and/or English meaning as valid answers.
    • If the guessing player gets it right, they keep the coin/paper square as one point marker. If they’re stumped, the asking player gets the point.
    • After all the characters have been uncovered, the player with the most point markers wins.

    Ring Toss

    Ring Toss
    • Choose a placemat where your child should know most of the characters since the ring may land anywhere.
    • Find a ring (the plastic ones from the neck of a milk jug work well), 10 pennies (as point markers) and a characters-only placemat.  If you can’t find a plastic ring, you can cut one out of construction paper.
    • Take turns tossing the ring onto the mat.  If  the ring lands between characters, toss again.
    • The first player who correctly calls out the character in the ring wins a point.
    • If one of the players does not know the characters, place the meanings mat next to the characters mat as an aid. Players who have the characters memorized will still be faster than players who are looking them up.
    • The player with the most points at the end of 10 tosses wins.

  • NY Times story on guest Mandarin teachers in the heartland

    Guest-Teaching Chinese, and Learning America

    Matt Nager for The New York Times

    Zheng Yue, who has been teaching Chinese in MacArthur High School in Lawton, Okla., working with a student, Raymond Veal.

    By SAM DILLON
    Published: May 9, 2010

    LAWTON, Okla. — Zheng Yue, a young woman from China who is teaching her native language to students in this town on the Oklahoma grasslands, was explaining a vocabulary quiz on a recent morning. Then a student interrupted.

    The New York Times

    “Sorry, I was zoning out,” said the girl, a junior wearing black eye makeup. “What are we supposed to be doing?”

    Ms. Zheng seemed taken aback but patiently repeated the instructions.

    “In China,” she said after class, “if you teach the students and they don’t get it, that’s their problem. Here if they don’t get it, you teach it again.”

    To read more, please click here.

  • Hilton Head Island may get Mandarin immersion in fall

    Area students may get chance to learn Chinese

    By KATE CERVE
    kcerve@beaufortgazette.com
    843-706-8177
    Published Sunday, May 9, 2010

    Ted Downing of Hilton Head Island has made more than 30 business trips to China over the past decade.

    On all of them, he just didn’t know what to say.

    He doesn’t speak Mandarin.

    So he was thrilled when he learned two Beaufort County elementary schools might begin offering a program in Mandarin this fall.

    That would give students interested in careers in international business, law or government an edge, he said.

    The process of learning a language offers another benefit, said Downing, whose daughter will start at Hilton Head Island International Baccalaureate Elementary School this fall.

    “It creates a challenge for a child,” he said. “I don’t know any other languages that are going to be as challenging as Chinese.”

    The Mandarin program depends on the Beaufort County School District receiving federal and state funds. The district has applied for several grants to bring partial immersion programs in Mandarin to the district’s two international baccalaureate elementary schools — Hilton Head IB and Broad River Elementary.

    In immersion programs, students study other subjects, such as math or social studies, in the target language.

    The program would begin with a group of first-graders at the Hilton Head school and a group of kindergartners at Broad River, said Sean Alford, the district’s instructional services chief.

    Alford said the program would be voluntary and immerse students in the language for part of the school day. The district hopes to eventually expand the program through middle or high school, he said.

  • Farwell, Mich. in Clare Co. to get Mandarin immersion Kindergarten

    From Friday’s Clare County Review:

    =====

    Farwell plans preschool, kindergarten program improvements

    “Next year will prove to be an exciting year for our elementary [school] as there are two big program improvements that are being planned now for implementation in September,” said Farwell Superintendent Dave Peterson.

    Information about the new programs was accidentally run as a Clare School column in the April 30 issue of the Review.

    The first program, called Universal Pre School, will allow enrollment of four-year-old students, “filling a void in our pre-school program,” said Peterson.

    The second new program will be the implementation of Mandarin Chinese, a combined course of language and mathematics, in the kindergarten program. Two parent meetings will be held on May 18 about the new Mandarin language and math program, one at 5 p.m. and the second at 7 p.m. Parents will have until May 21 to sign up for the new program, Peterson said.

    “In September, our kindergarten students will be greeted by a certified teacher from China. The foreign language teacher will deliver two different programs,” Peterson explained. Twenty-two kindergarten students will participate in an “immersion program,” being taught math while “immersed” in the Mandarin language.

    “If you were to observe the math class for these children you would hear that nearly 100 percent of the language being used is Mandarin. The beauty of this is that the children are learning the second language while learning math.”

    Read more here.

  • San Francisco State summer STARTalk program for 5th to 7th graders

    STARTALK Summer Mandarin Academy at San Francisco State University extends an invitation to current 4th-7th graders to join a fun and innovative 4-week summer program to develop their Chinese proficiency. More information and application can be found at http://userwww. sfsu.edu/ ~stlearn/.

    This sounds like an amazing program. They read comic books, watch Chinese videos, learn pop songs, become totally immersed in Chinese culture – and become much more fluent – but have a great time doing so.


  • You’re Invited to the Starr King Spring Fling!

    Sunday, May 23, 2-5pm
    Potrero Hill Neighborhood House
    953 deHaro Street
    Suggested Donation:  $10 adults, kids are free

    Food!  Fun!
    Entertainment!  Kids Activities

    Silent Auction Items:

    *Museums and Family Entertainment:
    Disneyland, Great America, Gilroy Gardens
    De Young/Legion of Honor Museums,
    Asian Art Museum, SF Symphony,
    House at Incline Village, NV.,
    Chinatown Alleyway Tour

    *Dining:
    Soup of the month club,
    Dinner of the month club,
    Dinner parties, Liberty Cafe,
    Pacific Catch Restaurant, Progressive Grounds Cafe,
    Wine and Cheese AG Ferrari Wine & Cheese Tasting,
    24th Street Cheese Company, Venga Empanadas

    *Kids
    Recess Urban, My Gym,
    Shan-Yee Poon Ballet,
    Wheel Kids, Project Commotion,
    Kids’ CDs from Charity and the Jam Band and Laurie Berkner

    *Plus Art, Jewelry, Massages, Hotel Packages and much more!

    RAFFLE:
    Grand prize: Playstation 3 plus games
    1st prize: barbeque grill
    <http://bbq-grill. wowshopper. com/htm-pages/ charcoal- grill-6000. htm>
    2nd prizes: Storypeople art print, Highlights subscription, grown-up
    and kids’ books, DVDs, games
    3rd prizes: gift certificates to Bed, Bath&Beyond, Books Inc, and more.

  • Fremont, Calif. considers Mandarin immersion program

    Fremont Unified considers Mandarin-English immersion program

    Posted: 05/04/2010 12:00:00 AM PDT

    FREMONT — Wei-Lin Tong remembers speaking only Cantonese at home during her early years, but as soon as her older brother went to kindergarten, the kids switched to speaking English full time.

    With two children of her own now, Tong is seeing history repeat itself. Her daughter spoke Cantonese and English until she started preschool. But these days, Tong said, “it’s English all the way.”Having learned from her own experiences, Tong — who travels overseas regularly for work — regrets not being more fluent in a second language. But she’s hopeful it’s not too late for her children, ages 5 and 3.

    Tong and other Fremont parents are pushing for the school district to start a Mandarin-English immersion program, similar to its Spanish-English program.

    Students would start out speaking Mandarin 90 percent of the time and English the remainder of the day in kindergarten. By fifth grade, the school day would be equally split between Mandarin and English.

    read more here.