February and March are the months many Mandarin immersion programs send out letters of placement or acceptance to new families.

As they rev up for new incoming Kinder classes, several schools have asked if they can buy my book, A Parent’s Guide to Mandarin Immersion, in bulk for those new parents.

The answer is yes, and a lot more cheaply than buying it from 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

You can read reviews here.

So here’s the deal for schools:

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 although no one’s yet done this, at 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

These are from CARLA, the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota.

If your program is new, it’s a great place for staff and teachers to get the basics. And if your program’s been around for awhile, the new workshop on character literacy (i.e. how to get kids reading in Chinese) is really exciting.

You can see more about this highly respected program at the link below. If your district can’t afford to send teachers, this would be a good one for parents to fund raise for!

http://www.carla.umn.edu/about/carlaupdate.html

Summer Institutes for Immersion Teachers

CARLA also offers these popular institutes that are designed specifically for immersion educators (K–12) and immersion program leaders:

Character Literacy Development in Mandarin Immersion—NEW!
June 20-24, 2016
Presenters: Tara Fortune, Luyi Lien, Haomin Zhang.

Immersion 101: An Introduction to Immersion Teaching
July 11-15, 2016
Presenters: Tara Fortune and a team of veteran immersion teachers

Meeting the Challenges of Immersion Education: Teacher Collaboration for Integrating Language and Content in Grades 5–12—NEW! 

July 18-22, 2016
Presenter: Roy Lyster

Information

• Find detailed information about each summer institute on the CARLA website at: www.carla.umn.edu/institutes
• Register now at: www.carla.umn.edu/institutes/registration.html
• Check out the stipends and scholarships available: www.carla.umn.edu/institutes/stipends.html
• Learn about the Advanced Practices in Second Language Teaching Professional Development Certificate offered by the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development in collaboration with the CARLA summer institute program: www.carla.umn.edu/institutes/certificate.html

The summer institutes have been developed and are offered with support, in part, from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI Language Resource Center program. The summer institutes are co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development and College of Liberal Arts.

Dual Immersion Program at Alhambra Unified School District

January 26th, 2016 by Monrovia Weekly

By May S. Ruiz

There has been a sea change in the employment landscape in the past decade as evidenced by shifts in what is available to people looking for work. Some positions that today’s youth would one day fill might not even exist yet, or may be located in foreign countries.

The Alhambra Unified School District (AUSD) has been actively finding opportunities for its student population to be ready for 21^st century job requirements. This fall, AUSD is rolling out its Dual Immersion Program to add to its slate of initiatives to make their students competitive in the global community.

Leading this charge is Jim Schofield, program director. He says, “Dual immersion is critical because future jobs could be in other parts of the globe. More and more, we do business with other countries, and knowledge of the local language is essential. An employee who can speak, read, and write in the dialect is much more valuable to the company.”

Schofield cites research to advance the case for dual immersion, “Although the majority of the world is bilingual, statistics show that only 17 percent of Americans speak another language; 56 percent of Europeans and 36 percent of Brits do. Being bilingual puts one on a higher tier in the American job market.

“Health-wise,” continues Schofield, “it protects one against diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s. A 2012 study conducted by the University of California, San Diego, revealed that of the 44 elderly participants who could speak both Spanish and English, those with higher proficiency in both languages were less likely to have early onset of either disease. While it doesn’t necessarily mean that being bilingual is the magic cure-for-all, it may help keep diseases at bay longer. Besides, it makes for a more enriching cultural experience; and being able to communicate is the best feeling in the world.”

Please read more here.

A bilingual mom’s got a nice blog series going about about building up a Chinese library for her bilingual kids. Note that she’s from Taiwan and is only talking about books in traditional characters. This won’t be helpful to folks with kids in programs that teach simplified, which are the majority in the U.S. But even so it’s a nice overview of some of the issues and gives you some insight into what’s available and what to look for.

 

JAN2016

Building A Chinese Library for the Kids

posted in Mandarin by hapakids

Parents in Fremont have been pushing  for several years now to insure that their program continues through junior high school. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting the school and speaking with parents there and I know how hard they’ve been working on this. Thankfully, their school district has agreed. Congrats to Fremont!

You can read the district’s full statement here. The important points are these:

• The Board accepted CIPCF’s recommendation to include two core Mandarin classes for all immersion students from day 1, rather than starting with only one core class in the first year (provided there are a minimum of 15 students for the class).
• Provide an optional 7th period as either a 0 period (proposed) or 7 period (board member suggestion) to immersion students so they can still take an elective class like other students.
• The staff recommended Hopkins Junior High in the Mission San Jose attendance area to host the programs.
• Spanish Immersion Program Jr. High starts in fall 2016 and Mandarin in fall 2017– all current Mandarin students will have the opportunity to continue to Junior High.

It’s great news that the students will have the possibility of an additional period so they can take an elective class. In many programs, including San Francisco’s Aptos Middle School, Mandarin is students’ elective, so they can’t take band or theater or other electives that their non-immersion peers are able to.

From the San Jose Mercury News:

Spanish and Mandarin immersion classes to be offered in Fremont junior high schools

Spanish and Mandarin immersion programs will be rolled out to junior high schools over the next three years, the Fremont Unified School District’s Board of Education has decided.

The school board voted unanimously Oct. 28 to expand the popular immersion programs that currently are taught at elementary schools.

At that meeting, parents extolled the benefits of extending dual immersion to junior high schools.

Some parents said they’d like to see the Spanish immersion program made more challenging and asked that the district do a better job of communicating the program’s expectations and goals.

One Fremont student addressed the board in Chinese as board Trustee Yang Shao translated.

Please read more here.

Plymouth Elementary School’s Mandarin Dual Immersion Program Helps Parents Too

November 17th, 2015 by Monrovia Weekly

By Terry Miller

Plymouth School in Monrovia has implemented a first of its kind in the district – a dual immersion program for students to learn Mandarin. In fact the school is on the cusp of what will, perhaps, become a trend in all public schools in California with the general uptick in Asian-American population in Los Angeles County.

Please read more here.