Immedium at CAIS Institute conference on Chinese Education

This weekend, we’ll present this weekend (April 11th at noon) at the Chinese Education Conference in San Francisco, CA.

The conference is sponsored by the CAIS Institute, founded in 1989 to advocate Chinese language and culture education nationwide. It is related to the Chinese American International School (CAIS), the nation’s first Mandarin-English immersion school.

Our session is titled “Immedium: Bringing Chinese Culture Alive through Children’s Picture Books”. Here's the official description:

We’ll share how modern children’s literature can bring Chinese culture into the classroom and energize students, teachers and parents. The popular series “Tales from the Chinese Zodiac” (The Year of the Rat, Pig, Dog, Ox, Tiger) dovetails perfectly with annual New Year celebrations at elementary schools. Other titles on martial arts, “Julie Black Belt”, sports “The Tao of Yao: Insights from Basketball’s Brightest Big Man” and graphic novels “9 of 1: A Window to the World”, can engage middle and high school students and provide rich opportunities for classroom discussion, group activities and self-exploration. Learn how a new wave of children’s books can invigorate traditional subject matter, and inspire both kids and adults to learn more.

Whew! It sounds like a mouthful but we'll spice it up with the books' lovely illustrations, useful handouts (which we're diligently working on), and reader feedback. We share our new stories with first graders at CAIS every year (as well as those enrolled in other Chinese language programs), so we're glad to meet more teachers from around the nation and introduce our tales to them.