Learning Mandarin can be fun!

Learning Mandarin can be fun! 

We believe that it is important to allow students to learn the language in meaningful communicative contexts.  In the Mandarin Bilingual program, the language is presented and used in practical stituations and interesting communicative tasks.

When students first start learning the language, we focus upon a high level of student participation and activities that stimulate the students' interests.  Some of the ways we do this are through listening to simple conversations, stories, rhymes, songs and skits.   
 Because the four tones of Mandarin are crucial for communication (changing the tone changes the meaning of a Chinese word), accuracy of tones is extremely important and emphasized in our program. 

To help support our students and their parents with tones and basic vocabulary, we are beginning to provide students with additional listening activities to support their learning at home.  These CDs include the teacher's voice reading words and stories from their recent lessons.  Students are encouraged to listen to the CD at home, as a way to increase their listening comprehension, proper pronunciation and understanding of this recently introduced material.  We believe this may alleviate some concerns parents may have if they do not know the Chinese language themselves.

As this is our first venture at providing this type of home support, we would greatly appreciate your feedback on the concept.  We look forward to hearing from you!
Getting Started with Mandarin - Listening Activities