The Mandarin Immersion programs are new. Where does their curriculum come from?
The District and the teachers are working together to create a unified curriculum that seamlessly moves from Kindergarten to fifth grade and beyond. They have received excellent help from already-existing Chinese programs such as the Cantonese bilingual program at West Portal Elementary School. The District, the teachers and the World Languages Program have created a Chinese curriculum committee which selects curriculum and creates standards and benchmarks for the Mandarin Program. The Mandarin program uses a mixture of two textbook series, teacher-created worksheets and other materials. The series are: My First Chinese Readers (from Better Chinese) This is used for social language and grammar. Shung Shung (Bridging East-West through culture and language) This is used for grammar and academic language and contains many well-known Chinese rhymes, tongue twisters, fables and poetry. In addition, teachers use a variety of worksheet that they themselves create, or worksheets used in the We
