Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

recent posts

about

  • Head of Avenues: The World School steps down

    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.

  • Special programs, including Mandarin, highly popular in Vancouver, BC.

    Vancouver, British Columbia has just one Mandarin immersion school, despite the city being 17% Chinese-Canadian. And yes, I didn’t read carefully and initially conflated it with the much smaller (and non-Canadian) city of Vancouver, Wash., which also has one Mandarin immersion program–but no French immersion!

    Clearly Vancouver’s choice programs are very popular, as are neighborhood schools. It’s always a quandary, how you balance these two things. I don’t envy districts trying to please everyone:

    “The city’s one early Mandarin Immersion program, at Norquay Elementary on the city’s east side, has 79 students vying for 22 spaces, which leaves 57 on the waiting list There are 529 French Immersion kindergarten spaces in Vancouver for September and all of them are full. Another 270 students who wanted a French Immersion school as their first choice are wait-listed. There are 66 Montessori kindergarten spaces for next year and all of them are full, with another 105 students on that waiting list. An International Baccalaureate program has 22 full spaces and 19 students on the waiting list, while a fine arts program has 22 full spaces and 20 students on the waiting list.”

    Many Vancouver kindergarten parents scrambling for school space

    Specialty programs and some neighbourhood schools have more students than spots

    BY TRACY SHERLOCK, VANCOUVER SUN MARCH 3, 2015
    Many Vancouver kindergarten parents scrambling for school space

    Hundreds of children in Vancouver will not be able to attend their kindergarten of choice in September.

    Photograph by: DARRYL DYCK , THE CANADIAN PRESS

    VANCOUVER — Nearly 500 kindergarten students in Vancouver won’t be attending their parents’ first choice of school in September, and more than 80 can’t even get into their neighbourhood school.

    Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Many+Vancouver+kindergarten+parents+scrambling+school+space/10858724/story.html#__federated=1#ixzz3TRLpix4m
    Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Many+Vancouver+kindergarten+parents+scrambling+school+space/10858724/story.html#__federated=1#ixzz3TRLGlq8e

  • Flipped classrooms in Chinese

    This is from the Asia Society’s Chinese Language Matters newsletter, which is chock-full of useful information for teachers, administrators and parents of kids studying Chinese. I highly recommend signing up for it here;

    Simple Machine

    Flipping the Classroom Propels Learning

    Launching a flipped classroom demands creativity and initiative. The payoff is cumulative. (Flickr/rowanbank)

    By Heather Clydesdale

    Steve Jobs described computers as “the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” Borrowing the Apple, Inc. founder and former CEO’s analogy, flipped learning is like a bicycle for the class: it applies simple mechanisms to take students and teachers further with less effort.

    In flipped learning, students acquaint themselves with new content and practice skills ahead of class via activities developed by their teacher and posted online. When class convenes, time that once was consumed explaining fresh concepts can instead be used engaging in project-based activities. Wenping Chen, a Chinese teacher and teacher-educator, is a convert to the format, and so are her students. “The first year, I did not believe they [students] would do the preview,” she says. “They did. Some prefer it to a group setting. It does help me a lot.”

    Chen’s endeavors are part of a larger initiative at her school, the Mandarin Language and Cultural Center (MLCC) in San Jose, California. Over the past three years, MLCC educators have made a concerted effort to flip their classrooms using three components: asynchronous online sessions, synchronous online sessions, and classroom sessions. “Kids can learn any time and at their own pace,” says MLCC principal, Jane Chen, describing asynchronous learning, where students log on and learn at their leisure.

    MLCC teachers create the online programs for each unit of their Chinese Wonderland textbook. They use Weebly, a web-hosting service featuring a drag-and-drop builder for audio, pictures, and videos; and Quizlet, which facilitates making online flashcards. The resulting materials are suitable and simple to fabricate for entry-level classes where content focuses on daily life. Teachers also design language-based hot potato and other games to help students practice sentence patterns and prepare for a synchronous session, in which the teacher and students log on at a pre-set time and interact online.

    “They are so into it,” says Yuchin Ho, describing both parent and student interest in synchronous sessions. Ho, a MLCC senior teacher and teacher-educator, uses AccuLive and Google Hangouts as platforms for her synchronous sessions, which are scheduled in consultation with parents. At a pre-set time, three or four students log on using their computer or tablet, and Ho drills them in a conversational style, giving instant feedback with respect to sentence structure, tone, pronunciation, and communication. Ho, who generally schedules a ten-minute preview and fifteen-minute review session each week, finds that her students respond best when she smiles at the camera on her computer instead of looking at the slides on the screen. She calls students by name and encourages them with praise, saying, “Even in the online class, the students still have interactions with you.”

    See the full post here.

  • But if you speak Mandarin, your brain might be wired differently

    February 24 2015, 6.10pm EST

    If you speak Mandarin, your brain is different

    From left to right. Mandarin employs a different part of the brain. Chinese man via XiXinXing/Shutterstock

    We speak so effortlessly that most of us never think about it. But psychologists and neuroscientists are captivated by the human capacity to communicate with language. By the time a child can tie his or her shoes, enough words and rules have been mastered to allow the expression of an unlimited number of utterances. The uniqueness of this behaviour to the human species indicates its centrality to human psychology.

    Please read more here.

  • Perhaps being bilingual doesn’t do quite as much we thought for the brain

    Not that it’s a bad thing by any means, but it could be that it’s not the total brain-workout we’ve thought.

     

    Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage?

    The New Yorker

    By Maria Konnikova

    JANUARY 22, 2015

    BY MARIA KONNIKOVA

    In 1922, in “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The words that we have at our disposal affect what we see—and the more words there are, the better our perception. When we learn to speak a different language, we learn to see a bigger world.

    Many modern language researchers agree with that premise. Not only does speaking multiple languages help us to communicate but bilingualism (or multilingualism) may actually confer distinct advantages to the developing brain. Because a bilingual child switches between languages, the theory goes, she develops enhanced executive control, or the ability to effectively manage what are called higher cognitive processes, such as problem-solving, memory, and thought. She becomes better able to inhibit some responses, promote others, and generally emerges with a more flexible and agile mind. It’s a phenomenon that researchers call the bilingual advantage.

    Please read more here.

  • We’re up to 190 Mandarin immersion programs in the US!

    I just updated my school list with Seashore Academy in Costa Mesa, Calif.

    That brings us up to 190 Mandarin immersion programs in the United States in 27 states and the District of Columbia.

    You can see the full list here.

  • Updated: 2015-02-25 11:46

    By Cai Chunying and Hua Shengdun in Washington(China Daily USA)

    For Jule Byrd and Sean Hancock, second graders at Baltimore International Academy, Chinese New Year has added significance.

    Jule and Sean were among the more than 140 pupils who staged a two-hour long performance gala in Baltimore on Monday evening, singing Chinese songs, dancing to Chinese music, acting in dramas based on Chinese tales and doing the catwalk in Chinese costumes. They are all in the public charter school’s Chinese immersion program, which covers kindergarten through eighth grade.

    More than 200 school administrators, teachers and parents filled the cafeteria-turned performance hall, enjoying shows in a language that many do not understand.

    “She impressed me every time she attended this kind of cultural event,” said Julius, father of Jule, who dressed in a red qipao, a traditional fitted Chinese garment for girls and women, and took part in three performances.

    “My teacher sent practice clips to my mom’s email, and I used that to practice,” Jule said in Chinese. She said she also practiced during recess or intermission between classes for about one month, led by her own teacher.

    In the immersion program, all subjects such as math and social studies are taught in Chinese so students become relatively proficient in the language. The academy has nine Chinese teachers. The 643-student school has immersion programs in four other languages: Spanish, French, Russian and Arabic.

    Please read more here.