The Mandarin Immersion Parents Council (mentioned here) has a brilliant post with ideas and specific resources for squeezing more Mandarin into your child’s daily life. It is geared toward parents who do not speak Mandarin themselves, and some of the ideas are specific to San Francisco but most could be used universally. A great resource.
[This has been cross-posted from Today's Mama.]
If you are raising Mandarin-speaking children in the Bay Area and would like to meet or interact with other families like you, I’ve recently learned about (and joined) a number of email groups that may be of interest:
*Advocates for Chinese Education is a Bay Area-based group that promotes Chinese-language learning in local schools. They helped set up the successful immersion programs in San Francisco public schools. Their website is here and their Yahoo group is here. They also produce an annual newsletter and run Mandarin Play and Learn groups for toddlers.
*The Mandarin Immersion Parents Council is an active group of parents whose children are in the SF immersion programs. Their website is a wealth of information about immersion programs around the country, resources for supporting Mandarin learners at home, and news about local schools.
*The Bay Area Chinese Education Community is a Yahoo group “for the sharing of information related to the learning of (Mandarin) Chinese language and culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pre-K through high school.” You can sign up to join here.
*Farther south, The Mandarin Chit Chat Yahoo group shares information and resources for Silicon Valley and the South Bay. Sign up here.
Please let me know of other resources I may have missed. I’m not aware of any group that focuses on the East Bay, but if any readers are interested in setting such a group up, send me a message and we can join forces.
PhD in Parenting blog has a lengthy and interesting post about raising bilingual children, and why and how to do it. Her conclusion for the “why”: “Overall, there seems to be a correlation between learning a second language and overall intelligence and open mindedness.” She also has a good overview of the various methods to use, depending on your family’s situation and environment. The post has generated a lively discussion on the topic in the comments section. Check it out here.
ChildBook has posted Top 10 Home Efforts to Help your Kids Learn Chinese Faster. Useful tips for learners of any language.
A few readings from around the web that may be of interest:
- “Child’s play in China” a British journalist and father writes about the different attitudes toward play he sees in his children and their Chinese classmates
On a related note, an American teacher in Beijing writes about a generation of only children in China being educated without much training in leadership or team work.
And on the topic of play (about which I feel strongly), here is an excellent public radio program on “the educational power of things like play, sports, music, memorization and reflection”:
(If you can’t hear this, click here.)
This last one is not directly China related, though I have found that my children learn Chinese, like other subjects, best through playing, creating, singing, and imagining in the language, not through memorization or sitting still in a classroom and being taught. This program presents a powerful argument for why that is so.
- NPR reporter Scott Simon writes a beautiful essay in the Wall Street Journal reflecting on Thanksgiving with his Jewish-French-Irish-Chinese family including two adopted Chinese daughters:
Our Chinese children sit at the Passover table and scrounge for Easter eggs. They wear “South Side Irish” green scarves around their necks on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s all in the family.
My wife came home one day from our daughters’ Chinese culture class to announce there would be no class next week. “Because of the Jewish holidays,” she explained, straight-faced. Only in America. Our girls speak French, like their mother. My wife and I join our girls to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in Mandarin. We’ve learned that families mixed by marriage or adoption don’t shrink or starve a heritage. They nourish it with newcomers.
Happy Thanksgiving. 感恩节快乐！
This isn’t directly related to bilingualism, but for those of us raising young children with an awareness of and appreciation for Chinese culture, I thought it provided an interesting perspective on the more difficult moments. The blog A Ku Indeed has a post about taking a Taoist approach to discipline. He quotes a verse of the Tao Te Ching:
Poem 43 says:
The softest things of the world
Override the hardest things of the world
That which has no substance
Enters into that which has no openings.
From this I know the benefits of unattached actions
The teaching without words.
The benefits of actions without attachment
Are rarely matched in the world.
The blogger then continues:
When I read this poem, I immediately see the connection to Big-P and our recent struggles. Basically, in trying to force her to do what she’s been told, and in focusing on correction and on punishment, we’ve set up (or me, more than my wife) an antagonistic structure within the parental relationship. Basically, I’m trying to make sure that Big-P does what I have told her to do. Partly, this is good-natured and well intentioned. However, part of it is undeniably egoistic and has little to do with care for Big-P. I mean hey — I’m not about to let a four-year old dictate to me what she does and doesn’t do! So partly it’s an egoistic reaction to her defiant behavior. “I’m the king here!” is what is partially running through my head while I am correcting and punishing and dictating.
This kind of behavior, as I’ve learned, simply makes things worse. As some Taoists call it, this is “Laozi’s Law” in action. When you push against something to enforce something on it, it pushes back. You push hard, it pushes back harder. The world resists your attempts to control it. This is epitome of what would be called an attached (as opposed to an unattached) action. It means not being “open” to the world, and instead trying to dictate to it how it should be.
Sam at Useless Tree, another blog looking at Chinese philosophy in contemporary life, goes a little further with this idea.
Interested by these ideas, I did a quick search to see what else has been written on the topic of Taoism and parenting. Quite a lot
