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.

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.

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Fremont Unified considers Mandarin-English immersion program

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.

5Q Channel is a Mandarin reading web site based in Taiwan that was created to use computer animation to put classic Chinese stories into a form that kids would want to watch, listen to and read, all in Mandarin. Funded in part by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, it aims to give students all over the world access to the story-telling tradition of China in a cartoon animated format that modern children love – and helping them read Chinese while they’re at it.

Last week a group of parents and teachers from Starr King and Jose Ortega elementary schools met with the creators of 5Q Channel, as they were in town to present at the Chinese Education Conference in San Francisco.

Mr. Tseng Jr-Shi, the general manager for the company that created the site, Lu Feng Technology, gave us an introduction to what our kids could find there.

It’s pretty cool.  There are also over 350 individuals stories that students from Kindergarten on up will enjoy watching. The topics include everything from classic Chinese stories such as the Journey to the West and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms to funny stories explaining the sometimes maddeningly confusing four-character sayings. These are part of any well-educated Chinese person’s daily speech, but you have to know the stories to know what they mean. I like that 5Q channel understood that kids wouldn’t know or care about classical allusions, so they’ve done cartoons illustrating them in modern settings.

Mostly it’s a closed site (no worries your child will click over into something you don’t want them seeing) where they can read along as they watch the story. You can set it for traditional or simplified characters, or English if you want to figure out what they’re looking at. The parents who attended the presentation were intrigued and of the 24 who’ve signed up so far, most report their kids are enjoying watching the cartoons – one more chance to tuck a little Mandarin-time into their day.

The Mandarin Immersion Parents Council negotiated a special yearly subscription price for the site, just $30 for one year. (We don’t make anything off it, we just liked it and offered to tell our parents about it.) However they’re only going to make it available for another two weeks. To sign up, click this link:

http://www.5qchannel.com/order/grouprate.htm

There aren’t many sites out there for Mandarin immersion students yet, so we were pleased to find this one, especially because they’re really going out of their way to make themselves useful to families where the kids read and speak Mandarin but the parents don’t. We’re sure more will be coming, but for now, this is a great place to let your kids play online and (many of us are thinking) a nice way to keep our kids’ Mandarin up during the summer months.

We’d love to hear more about how parents are using it, whether it’s helpful and what other resources you know of.

Beth