Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Here’s a nice story in the Calgary Herald about families succeeding in maintaining their home languages. Here here!

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Matthew Singh jumps out of the car boiling over with excitement as he’s about to enter a large play area with a multitude of new toys. As he walks into the aptly named

Coffee and S’cream he jumps up and down, nearly bouncing off the walls with excitement. His one-year-old sister Milla stares at him with admiration. While his dad, Chad Singh, pays the $5.71 per child entrance fee, Matthew proclaims: “Ja chcem ice cream!” His mother, Christine Wielezynski Singh, looks down at her son and, in response to his half-Polish, half-English sentence, quickly quashes his demand for ice cream– lody in Polish–by answering him solely in her mother tongue. The translation: “Maybe later you can have ice cream at home.” The child nods and we follow him and his sister into the play area. Matthew hops into one of the plastic kid cars and starts zooming around, much to the chagrin of one of the owners of the N.W. cafe who, moments later, asks him to slow down. Singh goes up to his son and in a calm manner tells him in Hindi that he has to watch out for the other kids. Matthew nods again and continues on his way.

At three and a half years old, Matthew is trilingual. The couple uses a popular language-acquisition method called “one-parent-one-language,” in which the mother always speaks one language with the child while the father always speaks another, whether it’s English or, as in Matthew’s case, a third language.

Read more here.





From the website Blue Oregon

By Dave Porter of Portland, OR. Dave is a retired health administrator who advocates for Mandarin language education and study abroad programs in Oregon schools on his blog.

Sometimes seemingly small decisions have big repercussions. Such is Portland Public Schools annual decision not to expand its Mandarin immersion program at Woodstock Elementary School in SE Portland. Great powers can rise and fall on the accumulation of such seemingly small issues.

Each year for the past four years Portland Public Schools has been turning away at least another full class of kindergarten students whose parents want them to enter the Mandarin immersion program at Woodstock Elementary in SE Portland. The program currently takes only 60 new kindergarten students annually.

Here’s the data for the past four years:
2006-07: 60 openings, 109 applications;
2007-08: 60 openings, 106 applications;
2008-09: 60 openings, 89 applications;
2009-10: 60 openings, 84 applications meeting criteria, plus another 17 applications “criteria not met;” (which probably means the parents missed a required meeting).

read more here.

*** Come find out about 2010 Fall Enrollment – Only 24 spaces. ***

Broadway Elementary School

1015 Lincoln Blvd., Venice, CA 90291

Phone: (310) 392-4944  Fax: (310) 314-7349  Email: swang1@lausd.net

Contact Person:  Susan Wang, Principal 王校長

Pilot Mandarin Language Immersion Program

Community Informational Meeting

中英文同步教學實驗班 – 公眾會議

Please attend an informational meeting to be a part of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s efforts to create a pilot Mandarin language immersion program at Broadway Elementary School.  We need to exchange information with interested parents to plan the future development of this pilot program.

請踴躍參加此次

洛杉磯聯合學區–Broadway Elementary School”所舉辦之

“中英文同步教學實驗班”資訊會議,

您的參與將會成為此教學計畫的主要力量之一

我們需要有興趣的父母們交換彼此的意見與資訊,

以成為未來此計畫之發展方向

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When:  Tuesday, April 27, 2010, 5:00 p.m. or Friday, April 30, 2010, 8:30 a.m.

時間;: 2010年,四月廿七日(星期二) 5:00 PM 或 2010年,四月三十日(星期五) 8:30 AM

Location:  Broadway Elementary School Auditorium

地點: Broadway Elementary School Auditorium

A nice rundown of Mandarin summer camps in the San Francisco bay area from the HaoMama blog.

Mandarin Summer Camps in Bay Area

Now that the rains have (mostly) left the Bay Area, summer is just around the corner (right?). For those who are looking for ways to keep little ones busy in summer months, I wanted to give a run-down of Mandarin immersion summer programs and camps in the area. A two-week (or longer) camp program can be a more manageable commitment for those who want to try out language immersion without committing to full-time school program. It can also be a gentler way to introduce foreign languages to kids in a more relaxed, fun setting.

Read more here.

There will be a few of us from the Mandarin Immersion Parents Council at the CEC conference, which begins Friday in San Francisco with tours of schools (say 你好 to our kids at Jose Ortega and Starr King!).

Read more about the conference here.

If you’re a parent or administrator attending the conference, look for us. And please come to our workshop on Sunday from 1-3 on how parents can support their kids, teachers and schools.

We’ll be posting info of interest to parents on the blog over the course of the weekend, so stay tuned.

Cheers,

Beth Weise, MIPC president

(This essay first appeared in the newsletter of the Advocates for Mandarin Education three years ago.)

Immersion Program Insight
普通话沉浸式教育家长之体验
– by Renee Tan

You’re in!  That crucial letter from the District has arrived and …..your child will
be entering a Mandarin Immersion program in the fall.  You’ve toured the schools, done
the research, looked at the data supporting the immersion model, and you’re confident in
the choice you made.  So now you look down at your little one and think about what life
will be like come late August and what can you do to prepare your child for that big first
day of school?  Here’s some insight from someone who has been there.
You decide to visit your local library and are delighted to find a section of books
in different languages. You even find books written in Chinese.  Since you might not be
able to distinguish between simplified versus traditional characters, you ask the librarian,
who is just as knowledgeable as you on this subject. After careful research, you learn that
the San Francisco Public Library system only has a handful of books in simplified
characters.
You realize all of this is pointless as you cannot read this to your child anyway.
So you move onto videos….you think ‘This is a much better choice!’  And they are much
better choice for about 15 minutes.  But the intrigue ends in about 15 minutes with the
video as background noise while your child builds something with the sofa pillows.
The first month of school arrives. What you find is that nothing could have
prepared you or your child for the experience of the first month of school.  The size of the
building is most likely daunting compared to the nice little preschool they attended.
Many of the kids are twice the size of your child.
All of this is a bit intimidating — though not as intimidating as the Tupperware
you packed in your child’s lunchbox.  You realize that your child is not eating because
he/she is unable to open the containers you so brilliantly packed.   You ask your child
how their day is and the response is “I don’t know.”  What most parents have discovered
is that the adjustment to kindergarten for your child is the same as for any child entering
kindergarten and the language issue is irrelevant.
By November, you can have the confidence that every child in the class can
respond back in Mandarin. Of course, some students can speak more than others, but
every child has a basic level of comprehension and everyone is answering the teacher in
Mandarin.  (This may happen sooner, the beginning of November was the first time I
spent a good hour in the classroom to witness the magic). Your child can write their name
in both English and Chinese!
By December, your child is tired, with that “deer in the headlights” look.  It is
physically draining to be instructed solely in a different language for more than four
hours a day, and this is when it becomes noticeable.  The winter break is a much needed
rest for your child!  Despite this, there is much progress now as most children can now
read a bit in Chinese as well as English!
January is a new year, and you child comes back to school relaxed and ready to
learn.  By now it seems like your child’s attention span is longer and so is the absorption
rate of information.  Chinese New Year is approaching and the children look forward to
the festivities planned around this huge holiday!
Once March rolls around, you will witness something truly amazing- your child
conversing with another child in Mandarin when they are not in school.  A true dialogue
outside of class.  Success!
Our child is now wrapping up his first year of Mandarin Immersion; it has been a
great experience.  Now that we have been through it, recalling the anxiety surrounding
how to prepare our child for 100% Mandarin for many hours of the day, my advice to all
future parents is this: Forget about Chinese. Have your child practice opening all the
containers in his/her lunchbox!

—
Renee Tan is a parent at Starr King Elementary with two children in in the Mandarin Immersion program, one in 3rd grade and one in 1st.