Bao & Bun's Bilingual Journey

Over the years, we’ve changed our Chinese learning strategy. My original plan was to send kids to mandarin immersion school plus Chinese after school. Later found out that Chinese afterschool doesn’t leave enough time for kids to finish their homework because they have their own curriculum to go through. Then I gave up that Chinese afterschool and now it’s just regular afterschool that they have ample time to finish school homework.

I also noticed the Mandarin Immersion school’s Chinese curriculum is too simple for my kids. That’s when I started to pay more attention to supplement Chinese online lessons at home in the level they’re at. I don’t mind MI school is teaching easy Chinese because I think any exposure at this point is better than nothing. And I believe reinforcement of seeing Chinese from all different angles can help with overall learning.

Lastly, I was very adamant about sending kids Chinese summer camps now we’re not even doing it this year. I did think twice about it and wonder if I made the right decision. For any parents in the states, I think pick up/drop off is one of the most tiring things that we do. Though we don’t live in the city where we drive, we still need to take bus( recently have been riding city bike) to go pick up kids.

That’s why when we found a pretty good afterschool/summer camp place that’s an easy location for us to do pickup dropoff. It’s one less stress for me and my husband everyday.

With that decision, then I need to supplement Chinese at home. We went back to Taiwan mid summer last year. The annoying part was that we couldn’t sign up most online summer classes. This year, we plan to stay here for summer so I am glad we can finally sign up those classes.

The first class I sign up is 小小繪本創作家：creating picture books. Little bun 🧒🏻 has always love drawing and I’ve seen her amazing creation over the years. I was eyeing this class last year. Students create their own pic books and I think the school publish for them in Amazon. I think it’s the perfect class for little bun and most importantly, it’ll be a Chinese/English book. 📕 @mycloudlearning