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.

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.”

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

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;

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