As incoming Kinder parents begin to think about how this Mandarin immersion thing they’ve signed up for is actually going to work, many programs around the nation are getting them a copy of A Parent’s Guide to Mandarin Immersion as a one-stop reading guide to language immersion.

Both schools and parent associations have purchased copies for their new parents, or as a sale item to support their programs. The books can be purchased in bulk much more cheaply than buying them through Amazon.

As a parent of two daughters who’ve been in Mandarin immersion programs at two different schools for a total of 17 years now, I wrote A Parent’s Guide as the how-to manual that I wished I’d had when we started this process.

Many schools have found that by giving copies of the book to parents early on (sometimes even before school starts) they can spend more time building a great school and less time explaining the nuts and bolts of immersion. Informed parents, teachers tell me, are calmer and more empowered parents.

A Parent’s Guide covers:

• How immersion works in the classroom
• The benefits of bilingualism for the brain
• Chinese 101 for immersion parents
• The academic possibilities immersion opens to students
• Chinese literacy issues
• The six types of Mandarin immersion families
• Why schools offer immersion
• How parents can turbo-charge their children’s Chinese

If you order 25 or more books, I can have them dropped shipped to your school for $12 a copy. If you order 50 or more they go down to $11 a copy. And, as one program did, if you buy 100 they go down to $10 per book.

Some PTAs have bought them and then sold them at the regular price of $18.95 as a fund raiser as well.

If your school is interested, please contact me at weise (at) well (dot) com

You can check out more about the book here:

Public language immersion school set for August opening

A bilingual dream five years in the making is about to become reality for Global Ambassadors Language Academy (GALA) founding director Meran Rogers.

Rogers’s new foreign language immersion school will open its doors on August 3, welcoming approximately 100 kindergarten and first-grade students to the former St. Vincent de Paul parish at 13400 Lorain Avenue. For its first iteration, the school will occupy only the ground and first floors of the 30,000-square-foot facility. Administrators expect classes to expand to the building’s second floor in coming years as GALA adds additional grade levels, up to eighth grade.

Fresh Water first reported on plans for the tuition-free, public charter school in October 2014. The effort has come a long way since then and the school has been hosting monthly open houses since February to show off its new digs and champion an educational model based around Spanish and Mandarin programming. This month’s open house events are scheduled for Thursday, June 9 at 5 p.m., and Saturday, June 11, at 10 a.m.

Please read more here.

The San Francisco Unified School District Mandarin programs is in four schools. The two elementary schools are Starr King and Jose Ortega. Starr King has two MI classes per grade, Jose Ortega one. Both feed to Aptos Middle School which in turn feeds to Lincoln High School.

With the growing popularity of Mandarin immersion preschools in San Francisco, many of which are 100% Mandarin with no English spoken, many students from English-speaking households are testing in at Kindergarten as Mandarin proficient.

This is a shift because the District’s program was originally designed to support children from Chinese-speaking immigrant families who needed help learning English. Instead, those slots are filling with children whose families speak only English and often have no connection to China at all.

The District hasn’t quite come to terms with this shift. We believe that its current system is to allot 50% of  Kindergarten spaces to students who speak English and 50% who come from Mandarin-speaking households. Though we’re not sure, as the District is very opaque about the criteria. It’s also possible that it’s 33% English, 33% bilingual Mandarin-English and 33% Mandarin.

What we do know is that whatever system the District is using was not constructed with a  flood of students from English-speaking families arriving at Kindergarten speaking fluent Mandarin, as is now happening.

–  Elizabeth Weise

Sought-after Mandarin program at SF elementary school divides siblings