Sky Kids is a Taiwanese-run summer program that takes place in San Francisco for  students from China and Taiwan.  Several high school students from the San Francisco Public Schools Mandarin immersion program work there as counselors, so I’ve been hearing about it for a few years now. Local Mandarin immersion families also sometimes host kids coming over, as a way for their children to get a chance to hang out with a Chinese speaker in the summer. 

This year, for the first time, Sky Kids is doing the reverse — a summer camp in Taiwan for English-speaking students who want to immerse themselves in Chinese. At least two San Francisco Mandarin immersion high school students are going over to Taiwan to work in the camp this summer (I know both kids, and their families, and they’re great.)

That said, I’ve never had a child attend the camp and therefore can’t vouch for it. But I thought it might be of interest to families with children in Mandarin immersion. – Beth

2019 Sky Kids Mandarin Immersion Camps @ Taiwan

After 5 years of running our own Mandarin camps and enrichment programs in San Francisco, we are ready to take Mandarin Immersion and Cultural Exchange to the next level in 2019!

For those near San Francisco, this is a helpful workshop for administrators and teachers.

Saturday, March 30, 2019
888 Turk Street, San Francisco 94102

Early childhood is an especially critical time for language learning, giving even more urgency for Chinese immersion educators to access one another and the collective wisdom of practictioners in this exciting, developing field. In partnership with a fantastic group of peer schools (see Planning Committee listing), CAIS is hosting the second annual Early Childhood Chinese Immersion Forum (ECCIF) for educators in Chinese immersion preschool and kindergarten programs to network and learn from one another. The forum includes a keynote presentation by renowned language educator Shuhan Wang, breakout sessions led by conference participants, roundtable discussions, and networking opportunities. We are thrilled to gather early childhood educators to discuss topics and share best practices in Chinese immersion in these critical, formative years for students.

主讲人 Keynote Speaker:

      Shuhan Wang, Ph.D. 王周淑涵博士

PLAYful Learning, Purposeful Guidance

In recent years, Chinese immersion preschools have been multiplying throughout the United States, especially in northern California and metropolitan areas such as New York City and Washington, D.C.Many of these Chinese immersion programs have been fairly successful in adopting play-based, project-based, or inquiry-based methodologies, borrowing from Montessori, Reggio Emilio, Waldorf, International Baccalaureate’s PYP programming, and others. However, a big question that remains is how to position Chinese language in the curriculum and instruction, despite the obvious fact that Chinese language should be front and center in a Chinese immersion preschool. For example, to what extent should the Chinese language become one of the content areas to be taught directly, and to what extent should it be embedded and integrated within a comprehensive and engaging general instruction? Drawing on studies in early childhood development, bilingual and biliteracy development, and dual language/immersion education, Dr. Wang unpacks how children learn through PLAYfulness (P: Peers and Relationships; L: Languages and Literacies; A: Actions and Activities; and Y: Yes, I Can!), and how educators can accompany the children with purposeful and intentional guidance every step of the way.

Shuhan C. Wang, Ph.D. Shuhan C. Wang, Ph.D. (王周淑涵博士) is the President of ELEConsulting International, LLC and Project Director of the Chinese Early Language and Immersion Network (CELIN) at the Asia Society. Dr. Wang has held a variety of prominent positions in language education, including Deputy Director of the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) at the University of Maryland and Co-Principal Investigator of the STARTALK Project. She was the Executive Director for Chinese Language Initiatives at the Asia Society and Education Associate for World Languages and International Education for the State of Delaware. Since 2012, she has been serving as an advisor to the Ministry of Education in Singapore on the Mother Tongue and Chinese Primary Curriculum Projects. Dr. Wang has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and Chinese language textbooks for K-12 students. She is a widely sought-after speaker at conferences and workshops nationally and internationally. She received her PhD in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.

 

For more information, please click here.

A new book by Dr. Chan Lü, a professor at the University of Washington (my alma mater and where I learned whatever small bit of Chinese still exists in my brain.)

A book that explores the learning of Chinese as a non-native language among schoolchildren in Chinese immersion education

This book examines one-way foreign language immersion education in the United States. It provides a clear and rich description of a Chinese (Mandarin) immersion program, its curriculum, instructional materials, assessment activities, parental involvement and student outcomes. The author analyses two studies that document the development of the students’ reading skills in English and Chinese, and the progress of their vocabulary knowledge, lexical inference, and reading comprehension in Chinese. In addition, this book contextualizes the program in its eco-system, including its neighbourhood, school, and the school district, and discusses the importance of school leadership, parental involvement, neighbourhood support and language acquisition planning in making an innovative school program successful. Its concluding chapters offer recommendations for program- and classroom-level practices and suggest pathways for future research on biliteracy learning in Chinese one-way immersion programs. This book will appeal in particular to students and scholars of applied linguistics, second language acquisition and language education.

You can buy the book on Kindle here.

The Chinese Lunar New Year is February 5th this year, though the celebration will continue for a full two weeks in China. If your children are in a Chinese immersion school, they’ll be making pig masks and learning about the Spring Festival, as it’s sometimes called, and hopefully eating some great goodies. 

Each year Jeff Bissell, headmaster of the Chinese American International School, the oldest Mandarin immersion program in the world, pens a lovely letter to the school about New Years and China. Here’s this year’s installment. Enjoy.

And 新年快乐 (Xīnnián kuàilè) from my family here in San Francisco to yours!

Beth 

[A New Year drawing from the HudsonWay Immersion School in Stirling, New York.]

In mainland China, where I lived from 1999 to 2010, school children enjoy a month long lunar New Year holiday.

Because I worked in a school during those years, I always traveled during that time. I lived in Beijing, which was home to millions of rural migrant laborers, and each year when the New Year rolled around, the migrants headed out of town—they were going home to spend the holidays with their families in small villages all over the country. I usually headed to either Yunnan or Guizhou, both mountainous provinces in the southwest, where I too would spend time in villages that bustled with the excitement of sons and daughters returned home for the holidays. In the villages, envious residents listened to the urban tales of their returned neighbors who had left their homes to work on construction sites, in restaurants, and in factories in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Dongguan, earning the equivalent of $100, $150, even $200 a month—an unimaginable amount for farmers in the mountainous villages of southwest China.

I knew that in the big cities of China these migrant laborers were members of an underclass, looked down upon by their urban countrymen who drove Toyotas, Volkswagens, or even Audis and lived in three bedroom, heated apartments. It is estimated that some 150 million rural Chinese have left their villages and moved to cities in search of work—the biggest mass movement of human beings in history. These people have fueled China’s double digit economic growth rates for the last 30-plus years. And every year, as the lunar New Year approaches, millions and millions of them cram into trains and buses, leave their city jobs behind and journey back home—the only chance they will have all year long to see their family members and friends. I imagine that these days the now digitally savvy rural transplants buy their bus and rail tickets via WeChat or Catriona apps on their smart phones. Every year the villages have more TVs, more motorcycles and more karaoke machines than the year before—all paid for with money sent back by family members laboring in China’s cities. The biggest source of cash income in most villages I visited was family members who had migrated to cities, found work, and sent their earnings home.

Homecomings were festive—village doorways had large, red paper characters pasted on them. In the center of every doorway were the characters 福 (fú “good fortune”) or 春 (chūn “springtime”) pasted upside down. When small children see the upside down characters they shout “good fortune is upside down!” or “springtime is upside down!” In Chinese, the word for “upside down” is 倒 dào. This is identical with the pronunciation of the word for “arrived” (到 dào). So the children’s cries of “Good fortune is upside down!” (福倒了 fú dào le) are identical in pronunciation to “Good fortune has arrived” (福到了fú dào le). On either side of village doors are pasted duìlián 对联 or poetic couplets, balanced seven character phrases with auspicious messages such as 八方财宝进家门，一年四季行好运 (From all directions wealth enters our door, in all four seasons of the year we have good luck) or 万事如意福临门，一帆顺风吉星到 (All things are as we wish and good fortune is at our door, everything is smooth sailing and our lucky star has arrived).

The Chinese language is rich with opportunities for wordplay, and this richness is most apparent during the New Year in rural China. In Yunnan and Guizhou, families eat glutinous rice flour cakes on the eve of the New Year. The sweet, tasty cakes are called nián gāo 年糕, whose pronunciation sounds like nián nián gāo 年年高 which means “every year is better than the last one.” Every family will eat fish on the lunar New Year’s eve, saying “every year we have fish” (nián nián yŏu yú 年年有鱼) which sounds just like 年年有余 meaning “every year we have abundance” (Su Laoshi’s second grade class shouted this to me in the hallway on their way to recess Tuesday morning). In the north of China people eat dumplings or jiăozi 饺子 on New Year’s Eve, not only because they are delicious, but because they also illustrate yet another clever play on words. Historically in China, each day was divided into twelve separate two-hour periods or watches. The period from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. was called 子时 or zĭ shí. On New Year’s Eve as midnight approached the time changed to zĭ shí. The term jiăozi nián 饺子 or dumpling has a similar pronunciation with jiāozĭ 交子 which means that time has entered the two hour period of zĭ shí—when the day changes from New Year’s Eve to New Year’s Day.

I always felt very fortunate to be able to spend the New Year with families who reunited in their villages—I learned a great deal about cultural traditions including language and food. This New Year, enjoy it with your children, whose teachers have shared with them many of the rich traditions of the lunar New Year. As you enjoy dinner on New Year’s Eve February 4, ask them to teach you about the traditions they have learned in school. You’ll be surprised and delighted by how much they know.

Happy New Year everybody!

Jeff

Jeffrey Bissell | 毕杰夫
Head of School
Chinese American International School

Glenwood Elementary to become language immersion magnet school

From The Tar Heel

By Jake Richard

Change is coming to Glenwood Elementary after the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education voted to convert Glenwood into a magnet school with an emphasis on its Mandarin language immersion program.

The program, which teaches students half of their curriculum in English and half in Mandarin, will become the central focus of the school.

An increasing amount of students have entered the Mandarin track in recent years, which has led to overcrowding at the school, said Jeff Nash, executive director of community relations for the district.

“Over the course of the years, we’ve added a new class each year as those kids have moved up,” Nash said. “There’s no more classrooms, so you’ve got to make some tough decisions with what you do with it.”

Please read more here.

Chinese Immersion Program introduces ‘new worlds’ to county students

From: The Cumberland Times-News

• JEFFREY ALDERTON 
• Oct 16, 2018

CUMBERLAND — Chinese educators visiting Braddock Middle School Tuesday expressed pleasant surprise that a Chinese Immersion Program is offered in the Allegany County Public Schools system.

“We visit mostly charter and independent schools every month, mostly on the West Coast and in New England,” said Paul O’Sullivan, the marketing director of HD Schools.

O’Sullivan and Jasper Pan, HD Schools’ CEO, were accompanied by Pearl You, a dual languages program consultant contracted by the Allegany County Board of Education for its Chinese Immersion Program.

More than 140 students from kindergarten through sixth grade are enrolled in the program at the West Side School and, for the first time this year, at Braddock Middle School.

Please read more here.

I don’t normally post job openings, partly because there would be so many and partly because Mandarin immersion teachers are so hard to find that it’s kind of evil to poach a teacher. That said, principal positions don’t come open very often, so it seems a slightly different thing and appropriate for someone looking to move up. The school has both a Mandarin and a Spanish track. 

HudsonWay Immersion School

HudsonWay Immersion School (HWIS) has the reputation as the “best Mandarin and Spanish immersion program in NYC and NJ” due to its unique full immersion model, early start in preschool, teacher training and immersion leadership.   Reflecting that reputation, the school’s mission is to develop students as flexible thinkers, culturally aware and linguistically capable in at least two languages.

 

HWIS, serving children ages 2 to Grade 5, is the oldest independent Mandarin and Spanish immersion program in the NY/NJ area with two campuses – one on the upper west side of Manhattan, and one in NJ.  The school is poised to more than double enrollment growth with recently-obtained funding to expand and relocate the NY school in September 2019, and with the recent NJ move to a newly renovated Catholic school in NJ this past September 2018.  The school has also announced plans to grow in grades through grade 8 by 2021.

 

The new educational director/head of school will report to and partner with a board consisting of three owner investors.  Two of the owner investors are the original founders having started this school for their own children 13 years ago.  The third investor joined HWIS in late 2018 to support the NY expansion. Initially the role would focus on the education and operations of the school, expansion to middle school grades 6-8, development of after school clubs and building the parent community. The roles of finance, legal, HR, marketing and admissions would be outside the scope of the role.  It is believed that in 2-4 years the role would expand to include these functional areas and evolve from Educational Director to Head of School.

 

Educational Director/Head of School

The Educational Director (ED) is a leader who is a strong collaborative builder of people, possesses pedagogical high standards, and is passionate about the benefits of immersion education.  The ED will oversee two locations:  Stirling, NJ and NY, NY.  Reporting to the ED will be a team of assistant directors with both significant and newly acquired immersion experience.  The position will be subject to a bi-annual review by the school founders.

 

The successful candidate will possess many of the following experiences and skills:

 

• MA in Education related field (Administration, Curriculum & Instruction, Linguistics, etc.)
• Prior administrative experience in a leadership role in an independent school
• Prior teaching or administrative experience with an immersion school
• K-8 and early childhood experience
• Excellent community-outreach and relationship building skills
• Extensive knowledge of curriculum development; new research and technology enhancements
• Ability to create and sustain positive, ambitious school culture among staff and students

• Ability to develop teachers- mentor, provide feedback and constructive criticism, corrective action, coaching and discipline if necessary.

• Experience in assessment and achievement data analysis
• Leading school in acquiring accreditation

• Bilingual/fluent in one of the languages of instruction – Mandarin or Spanish

• Ability to partner with HR, Accounting, Admissions, Facilities, etc. in upholding and enforcing School policies and procedures
• Excellent communication skills– clear, direct communication with tact and professionalism
• Highly organized and attentive-to-detail, ability to manage administrative paperwork

Responsibilities:

Personnel and Programs

• Inspires a culture of mission-driven excellence and inclusion
• Implements and enhances a language immersion education program that promotes an international perspective for responsible citizenry at both a local and international level
• Manages and supervises all full and part-time staff
• Helps formulate performance management and culture of accountability
• Ensures that school’s curriculum and programs are evolving to meet student needs
• Ensures that school appearance and day to day management of operations is smooth
• Coordinate and oversee staff development and training that is aligned with New York and New Jersey State Standards, and the school’s curriculum
• Conducts regular staff meetings
• Designs and implements professional development workshops for all employees
• Oversees school data reporting systems and data analysis to inform instructional practice
• Effectively recruits and retains student population
• Effectively recruits and retains teacher population
• Provides input in developing the school’s long-term strategic plan
• Oversee the development of other programs such as after school, extended care, summer camp and Mommy & Me
• Works with high schools to develop feeder programs in support of ex-missions
• Works with licensing regulatory bodies

 

Parents/Community

• Ensures that the school builds enrollment and retains students
• Maintains an open-door policy for parents
• Participates in Family conferences when appropriate
• Articulates the school’s mission and vision to parents and the community
• Works with the parent association

 

 

Financial

• Oversees the implementation of the school’s annual budget
• Tracks and assigns all purchases
• Assures proper reporting of financials to Owners

 

Policies and Procedures

• Provides regular updates to founders/investor on:
  • Policies and procedures
  • Curriculum plan and achievement
  • Parent satisfaction
  • HR plan
  • Budget updates

Supervisory

• All instructional teachers; a diverse cultural and lingual employee base
• Administrative – finance, custodial, HR, admissions (this may evolve in year 2)
• Parent volunteers

 

 

Benefits:

• Competitive salary
• Benefits package to include vacation, health, 401K etc.

 

 

There will be an initial contract for a two-year period as Educational Director, followed by a two-year period as Head of School.  This is a Full-time 12-month position.  To start as soon as agreed upon, possibly prior to the end of the 2018/2019 academic year.

 

To Apply

Applicants may submit a cover letter, resume (with salary requirements) and a personal statement to: hr@hwis.org

 

HWIS is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity in the workplace. We actively encourage all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or sexual orientation to apply.

 

We regret that we will not be able to respond to every submission.  Only applicants of interest will be contacted.

 

Thank you for your interest in working for HWIS.