From our friends at the Asia Society’s China Learning Initiatives.

A Road Map for Planning a Successful “DIY” Two-Way School-to-School Partnership Exchange Program: Part I
Timeline, Key Components and Other Tips

BY HEIDI STEELE
This article is intended for people who are running a “DIY” two-way exchange in which a school’s language teacher/coordinator is handling all of the arrangements and logistics, rather than those who have partnered with an educational tour company to manage the process. If you are running a DIY one-way program, there may still be information here that you will find useful.

While every program has its own specific structure, my hope is that sharing a road map of the planning process for our exchange program (between the Gig Harbor and Peninsula High Schools in the Peninsula School District of Washington State and the Mudanjiang No. 1 High School in Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang Province) may help other programs get off the ground smoothly.

The planning and timeline below is for a one-month long two-way exchange program. Chinese students (usually between four and seven) arrive and stay in the U.S. for a two-week homestay with their American partners. Immediately following this, the entire group travels back to China, and American students stay for two weeks in their Chinese partners’ homes. Finally, the American students and I end the trip with four to five days on our own in Beijing.

Our program has a very simple financial arrangement. Each side is responsible for their own airfare and visas. On our side, the families equally share the cost of my plane ticket and visa, as well as the hotel in Beijing. All of the hosting expenses are born by the host school and/or families. If either side wants to extend their trip by visiting other cities (for example, our time in Beijing), the traveling side is responsible for the additional expense.

Please read more here.

This is a popular site at schools, but I think it’s not widely known among parents.

The cool thing about SnapLingo is that it’s real interaction with real Chinese kids, but it’s curated so you know your child is chatting safely. Kids will work a lot harder when they’re a real person, especially another kids, on the other end of the line. Check it out and report back whether your kids like it. I’m curious what they think.

You can see a video about how it works here.

Here’s their website.

SnapLingo

Students from China and America share language and culture through SnapLingo, an interactive app that improves language abilities through fun photo posts and chat missions.

SnapLingo is a mobile social platform that connects students (age 7 – 15) from the USA and China.  SnapLingo matches students as language buddies to practice foreign language and teach each other their native language and culture. Through guided photo missions, creative challenges, and rewards, students share the world around them while also seeing it through their language buddies’ eyes. Guided group sessions are used to spark conversation about culture and life abroad, while exposing them to foreign language giving them the chance to practice reading, listening, speaking, and writing.   It is on a secured network where parent/teacher involvement is required in the registration process.  Some schools are using SnapLingo to connect with their sister schools in China.  We can connect class to class.

A few chosen SnapLingo users will be given the honorary status of Bilingual Star.  Bilingual Stars improve their Chinese and earn cash rewards by communicating regularly with students in China.  Earn while you Learn!

Those great Shanghai guys at The Mandarin Companion, Jared Turner & John Pasden, have taken their e-book* translation of The Secret Garden (a classic kids’ book) into Mandarin and turned it into a print book. While I really like the e-book version because you can click on words you don’t know and jump directly back to the vocabulary list, for many people I know a print book is a better “form factor” (to use the fancy Silicon Valley term.)

Either way, these are great ways to get kids reading in Chinese, they’d be especially good for middle school students as the stories have a little umph but they’re in easy-to-read Chinese.

You can buy it from Amazon, (I linked to the page where you can buy it) or go to the Mandarin Companion website to see all the various possibilities here.

And they’re working on Dickens’ Great Expectations, which is very cool. And it will be Level 2, nice as all their previous books have been Level 1.

Check out their site here.

* One problem people have noted is that when you click on a word in Chinese to hop to the English translation, it can be a hassle to find your place in the book again. They posted these solutions to the problem on their blog: ” If you are using a Kindle, there is a “back” button on the reader that can take you back to the place you just left. If you are using iBooks, touch the page to bring up the navigation menu and there is usually text on the bottom strip in the corner that says something like “go to p 12″ (or whichever number) which will take you back to the last link you came from. There is similar functionality built into the kindle reader app for different mobile devices. If all else fails, a crude method is to bookmark the page before you click on a link so you can easily find your way back.”

The Secret Garden in Paperback
Many of you have been waiting for this day. I’m happy to announce that The Secret Garden《秘密花园》is now available as a printed book on Amazon! We’ve realized that doing the first of anything takes more time than the second. The Secret Garden will always be a special story to John and me because it has been a number of firsts: our first Chinese graded reader, our first ebook, and our first print book. Because of that, we’ve collectively spent more time working on the Secret Garden than any other story thus far (although the upcoming “Great Expectations” is going to be a close 2nd). The print edition is now available on Amazon and we are now ready to take larger orders for schools and organizations.

More good news is on the way; our four other Level 1 graded readers will be available in print edition by then end of this March. We are currently proofreading and finalizing the print designs.

Level 2 Graded Reader: Great Expectations
Great Expectations《好美的前途》is on the way! Adapting a Charles Dickens novel has been much larger task than we anticipated. In fact, despite simplifying and condensing the story, it has turned out to be so long that we are dividing the book into 2 parts: 上 and 下. To put it in perspective, our level 1 readers are approx 9-11 thousand characters in length while the entirety of Great Expectations will be approximately 30 thousand characters in length! This new book will be labeled as an “extended reader”, the first ever in Chinese!

Great Expectations will be set in modern day Shanghai. There will be fun easter eggs, specifically regarding the locations in the book which will be real locations and addresses in and around Shanghai. We had a lot of suggestions for Pip’s Chinese name and in the end we selected “小毛” (Xiǎomáo). The expected release date will be in April.

John and I want to sincerely thank you for your support and encouragement! We are so excited to make it possible for so many to read in Chinese.

I can’t imagine letting my kids leave home early, I’m already dreading college and it’s years  away. I’ve told them the only boarding school they’re allowed to get in is Hogwarts–but they have to take me with them!

Still, a surprising number of families I know and love are considering boarding schools, for all sorts of reasons. Enough to make me reconsider my preconceptions. And this one seems pretty amazing, it’s a great school and you get immersion.

Just throwing it out there for folks for whom it might be of interest

Be a Pioneer

MARCH 4, 2015
Chinese naming ceremony for Cave Creek kindergarteners

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ccusd chinese naming Chinese Immersion students at Horseshoe Trails Elementary School (HTES) received their official Chinese name during the bilingual naming ceremony. These kinder students were able to learn the special meaning of their new name and leave with their name written in calligraphy by our own HTES artist Chinese teachers.
Courtesy photo
CAVE CREEK – Kinder students in Cave Creek Unified School District’s Chinese Immersion class received their official Chinese names during a bilingual naming ceremony last week. In China, names are important and have to be carefully created. The names have to sound beautiful in the tonal language and they usually represent something special about that person.

Horseshoe Trails Elementary School parents are impressed with the results in the Touch of Immersion kinder classroom and have received first priority to fill the two first grade Chinese Immersion classes for the 2015-2016 school year.

Please see more here.

A nice example of a smaller program starting a parents’ group to support its Mandarin immersion program. I especially like the link between the name of the group and the broader school’s mascot.

And *this* is the Vancouver that’s just across the Columbia river from Portland, Oregon.

Naselle parents group creates the Rising Star Fund

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

The South Pacific County Community Foundation is assisting a Mandarin language program at Naselle Elementary School.

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NASELLE — The Liu Xing Parents Group in Naselle has started an education fund with a local community foundation to bolster funding for the Mandarin Immersion Program. Liu Xing means ‘Rising Star’ in Mandarin — a complement to the school’s existing mascot “The Comets.”

The steadily expanding educational initiative offers half-day language immersion for 55 students in grades K-2 at Naselle Elementary School. Growing by one additional grade each year, it will serve K-5 and 100-120 children with three full-time Mandarin teachers by the 2017-18 academic year.

Unlike traditional foreign language classes taught in middle and high school, immersion programs in the early grades are widely considered to be the best way for students to become functionally bilingual. In the immersion model, classic subject matter such as Math and Social Studies are simply delivered in another language during the optimal language acquisition timeframe for young children.

Please read more here.

Avenues makes a big deal about being an immersion school, offering both Spanish and Mandarin immersion. However when I visited last year I did not get the impression that in Chinese, students got 50% of their academic instruction in Chinese, which is the definition of immersion.

Education Entrepreneur Chris Whittle Resigns From Avenues School
Avenues: The World School plans expansion into Brazil and China

By SOPHIA HOLLANDER
March 5, 2015 5:48 p.m. ET

Chris Whittle, the education impresario who some credit with igniting the national charter-school movement, has resigned from his latest, high-profile venture, Avenues: The World School, officials at the Chelsea private school said Thursday.

“Chris is a great entrepreneur and I think he’s come to the conclusion that he probably accomplished what he wanted to accomplish,” said one of the school’s original co-founders Alan Greenberg.

“I am proud for sure of all that we’ve done. There’s plenty more to do,” Mr. Whittle said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “And I’m sorry I’m not going to be a part of it.”

The for-profit school, which raised $75 million to open in a renovated landmark building near the High Line. It pitched itself as part of a future global network, promising that students could move seamlessly between the Manhattan campus and 14 other schools around the world by 2021.

With its stylish historic building, abundant technology (every student receives a laptop and an iPad) and high-profile leadership drawn from some of the top academies in the country—including Dalton and Exeter—Avenues quickly established itself in the competitive New York City private-school landscape.

The school is on pace to exceed enrollment targets. Official say they have expanded the number of sections per grade, and are expecting 1,375 students next year, when the school fields its first 12th-grade class. In 10 years, they project enrollment to reach 2,120 students annually—32% higher than their initial estimates.

Please read more here.