The Newport-Mesa school district has launched its first Mandarin Immersion Program at College Park Elementary School, in which kindergarten students will be instructed in English and Mandarin.

For the inaugural year, the program is starting with 20 students and one teacher, Vivian Lam, to guide them.

From 8 a.m. to 1:05 p.m., lessons for social studies, reading, language arts and science are taught in English while reading and language arts are taught in Mandarin. Math is taught in both English and Mandarin.

Before coming to the Costa Mesa school, Lam taught in a Mandarin immersion program at Broadway Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“When you know more than one language, there are more opportunities available to you,” Lam said. “You could work at big companies, become a translator or even just help the people around you. And a lot of studies show that learning different languages at a young age will expand students’ cognitive abilities.”

Please read more here..

NAVARRO TALKS DUAL LANGUAGE IMMERSION INITIATIVE (VIDEO)

Montgomery County Councilmember shares in this MyMCMedia Extra that she is in “conversations” with Montgomery County Public Schools officials about the creation of a dual language immersion program.

“What if we had dual language programs where you can have that low-income Latino student learning English and perfecting their Spanish alongside their peers- who are learning Spanish and perfecting their English at the same time,” she said.

Read the story and hear the podcast here.

I got an email from them this week. Has anyone used them? How did it go?

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Here is a brief description of PandaTree:

One-on-one conversation practice with Mandarin tutors

We’ve hired amazing Mandarin tutors to help kids grow their fluency and confidence.  All of our tutors have been kid-tested and teacher reviewed, and every online, one-on-one session is completely tailored to the student’s interests and Mandarin level.   

Free educational Mandarin videos for kids and teachers

From tongue twisters to basic phrases to modern slang, our fun, short videos can be used by teachers in the classroom or by kids at home.  We’re making this educational content available  – for free – and we’re adding more content all the time.

Read what the Palo Alto Weekly recently said about us.  Please reply to this email if you are interested and available to get together briefly next Tuesday. For more information, visit our website, www.PandaTree.com to watch a video on how PandaTree works,

Dual Language Immersion Thrives in SP School District

Say District Officials

CLEARFIELD, UTAH —Speaking in Mandarin Chinese, Lisa Reed asked her fourth graders to calculate what to charge their customers for a bottle of Ramune soda.

And they answered in Mandarin.

Reed’s students are just a few of the 2,000 students in Davis School District learning the challenging language.

In four elementary immersion schools, four junior high schools and all eight high schools in the district, students are learning to speak with the help of instructors – the majority of whom are native speakers.

In four elementary immersion schools, four junior high schools and all eight high schools in the district, students are learning to speak Mandarin

Please read more here.

From our friends at the Asian Society.

Seattle Mandarin Immersion Programs include programs at Beacon Hill International School, Dearborn Park International School, Mercer International Middle School Seattle, Washington. These programs are serving students in grades K-7 (and expanding),

In 1995, a visionary leader, General John Stanford, took the helm of Seattle Public Schools. As he became familiar with the diversity and multicultural “challenges” in the district, he viewed them as assets and envisioned a school where all students would learn languages and discover how to work together and understand the world. He asked Karen Kodama to be the principal of this yet-to-be-invented “international” school. Karen organized a group of parents and educators to work with local businesses, large and small—the future employers of Seattle Public Schools graduates—to understand the knowledge and skills needed to serve the local and global market. They identified the need to create pipelines of international K-12 schools and develop students with strong language skills beyond English.

Seattle opened its first language immersion program in Spanish in 2000, at John Stanford International School. The next year, Japanese was added as a second language option in the school. The business community had also identified Mandarin as a future high-need language to be developed, and the district added that to the plan for future expansion.

Read more here.

Startup Oakland charter Yu Ming is flourishing
By Maya Mirsky

OAKLAND — What started as a simple phone call has now turned into a new job for Sue Park, the new head of school at Yu Ming, an Oakland elementary charter school.

It’s exciting times for the Mandarin immersion school as it welcomes a new head of school and prepares for its entree into middle school next year. But for the school community, change is part of how the school functions, and nothing to be scared of. “It’s a startup school,” said Rodrigo Prudencio, a Yu Ming parent and former board chairman. “We’re constantly going to be working and refining.”

Park originally moved to Oakland’s Montclair neighborhood when her husband got a job in the Bay Area. She was going to start looking for job opportunities, but first, she called Yu Ming to find out about enrollment for her three children, who had already been in a Mandarin educational environment. Finding the head of school job open seemed providential.

“Just the timing was really fortuitous,” she said.

Please read more here.