From The Lansing State Journal

RJ Wolcott,

LANSING – Putting aside the remnants of their breakfasts, the students inside Room 128 of Lansing’s Post Oak Academy formed a circle around their teacher, Yu Qiu.

If the group of fourth-graders was feeling the Monday blues, they weren’t showing it. Several sprang from their chairs, eager to join in on the morning name game.

Qiu scanned the students gathered around her and slowly crept toward Morgan McKissack.

Before Qiu could get there, Morgan shouted the name of another student in the circle. Qiu turned and trained on her new target.

Wensen Pei fumbled his words. Qiu tagged him. The youngster replaced his teacher in the center of the circle.

Getting her students to use the Mandarin pronunciation of their peers’ names was the goal. It’s the first step to getting them to converse in the language they use for half the school day but seldom speak at home.

Please read more here.

OCTOBER 26, 2017 11:39 AM

You all know I’m a huge proponent of reading for pleasure as a way to build vocabulary, gain a better grasp of academic language and just generally become a more educated human being. And that goes for Chinese, too.

Some researchers who look at reading for pleasure (and please, note the pleasure part of this. If it ain’t fun, it ain’t happening!) recently published a book on this. I highly recommend it. And it comes in simplified and traditional Chinese as well. If there isn’t enough reading going on in your child’s classroom, get a copy in the appropriate characters and give it to your child’s teacher…

Dr. Christy Lao from San Francisco State University, Dr. Stephen Krashen and Dr. Sy-Ying Lee from National Taiwan University of Science and Technology have just published a book titled Comprehensible and Compelling – The Causes and Effects of Free Voluntary Reading. The traditional Chinese character version titled “自主阅读” is published by Commonwealth亲子天下出版社 in Taiwan, the simplified Chinese character version will be published by XinJiang Juvenile Publishing House 新疆少年儿童出版社in China. 

I don’t have personal experience with this school but it sounds like a fair number of families from immersion programs have sent their kids.

They’re holding information sessions in San Francisco and Palo Alto next month, but you can also just check out their website. Or click the link below, which goes to a full brochure about the program.

China High School Programme 2017-2018

Mandarin language immersion debuts at Mission Viejo middle school

At first glance, this sixth-grade classroom at Newhart Middle School looks normal with its clustered desks, hand-drawn posters and teacher standing at the front of the classroom.

A closer look and listen, however, reveals something entirely different.

Newhart has become the first middle school in the Capistrano Unified School District to offer a Mandarin immersion program, in which students take two courses — one on the Mandarin language, another on social studies — taught entirely in the foreign language.

The 30-student program kicked off at Newhart in August with students who took years of Mandarin immersion at Marian Bergeson Elementary School in Laguna Niguel.

Inside the classroom, students converse, ask questions and respond to teacher Letitia Endow in Mandarin.

“I want Chinese to come to them like second nature,” Endow said.

The Mission Viejo instructor taught Mandarin as a foreign language for six years before coming to Newhart and teaching immersion for the first time.

Please read more here.

Inside the UK’s first bilingual English and Chinese primary school

Kensington Wade tempts tiger parents with full immersion in Mandarin

OCTOBER 7, 2017

By Joshua Chaffin in London

As a girl growing up in an English-speaking household in Singapore, Prema Gurunathan grudgingly studied Mandarin. Now a mother in west London, she is taking no chances with her own son. When he turned one Ms Gurunathan insisted their household in Hammersmith speak Mandarin for half of each week. She recruited an au pair from east Asia (she prefers not to say exactly where, for fear of tipping off the competition).

And last month, she and her husband enrolled the three-and-a-half year-old at Kensington Wade in London, Britain’s first primary school to offer full Mandarin immersion for its pupils. “It’s intellectual, it’s cultural and it’s ‘future-proofing’, if you will,” said Ms Gurunathan, a self-confessed “tiger mom” and policy wonk, explaining her school choice. “And it’s fun.”

Please read more here.