The STARTALK/Confucius Institute Chinese language immersion sports camp is now accepting applications for its three-week residential program on the UH Mānoa campus.

Thirty motivated middle and high school students, ages 12-17, with no or little experience in Chinese, will be selected to participate. Half will be from Hawai‘i and the rest from the U.S. mainland.

Participants will acquire basic communication skills in Chinese, and use these skills to make friends with each other during the camp, as well as getting to know contemporary China and its culture. For physical activity, they will practice table tennis and martial arts daily, under the tutelage of championship level instructors from the People’s Republic of China.

Alumni of the camp are invited to travel to China in subsequent summers. The camp will begin on July 5 and end on July 23.

In the same program, twenty Chinese language teachers who seek to make language learning fun and effective will be focusing on innovative, meaningful activities for students, including technology driven ones. A teacher-training institute will begin July 1, and continue throughout the camp.

On the last day of the camp and institute, students will stage performances to entertain and demonstrate their skills in Mandarin Chinese and understanding of Chinese culture. These performances will be video-recorded and shared with a national audience.

more here.

(from the Clare County Review)

Farwell BOE told 27 sign up for kindergarten Chinese

The start of Monday night’s Farwell Area Schools Board of Education meeting was delayed so that Board members could attend the band concert that was scheduled at the same time as their usual 6:00 p.m. meeting.  Acting as Chair for the meeting, Treasurer Irene Hanner called the meeting to order at 7:43 p.m.

The information/discussion agenda was relatively small, and the Board took just over an hour before they went into Closed Session to discuss negotiations.

Superintendent Dave Peterson reported, “We just finished up kindergarten round-up last week Friday, and we’re pretty much on track with other years; we’re in the mid-80s for kindergarteners enrolled.”

Of those 80-some, Peterson said that 27 had signed up for the new Chinese Immersion program.  “We will have a lottery,” Peterson said, “It’s the only fair way to do it.  Not all that’s signed up will get this program because you just can’t.”   Kindergarten classes usually have 20 to 25 students in them, and the sign-up period for the Chinese Immersion program extends until May 17^th.  Peterson also noted that a grant that is pending may also be used to expand the Chinese Immersion program to pre-schoolers.

read more here.

The founding families of East Bay Mandarin Immersion seek to create a public K-8 Mandarin immersion program in the East Bay targeted to open Fall 2011.

Our children need skills such as cultural awareness, second language skills, creativity and critical thinking to effectively contribute to our global community.

Come to our free informational meeting to learn more about creating a world-class educational opportunity for our children. Wednesday,

May 26th at 6pm at the South Branch Berkeley Public Library at 1901 Russell St at MLK.

Please RSVP to eastbayimmersion@gmail.com. Look forward to meeting you!

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.

Area students may get chance to learn Chinese

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.

From Friday’s Clare County Review:

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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.