Summer ends, and not a moment too soon!

I know my blog has been woefully neglected as of late, but that should change soon as I'm now offically on maternity leave. The preceeding six weeks were, to be honest, quite hellish. The school was in full summer-session swing, and that meant my workload increased tremendously just as my energy levels were starting to decline. However, it's over now and I won't be teaching again until sometime next year. As much as I love my students, I have to say it will be good to have an extended break, something I haven't had in awhile.

I have another reason for choosing to blog today. I wanted my readers to know the Multicultural Living magazine has published an article about my school. Multicultural Living is a beautifully formatted online magazine with articles dealing with issues such as bilingual/multilingual education and lifestyles, living abroad, and cultural differences. There are book and product reviews, recipes, interviews, Q&A columns and features. My article, which is titled "Bringing Bilingual Education to China's Youth: Helping children learn to love a new language" is in the September/October issue, the education issue. A subscription to the magazine costs 12 dollars a year and you can read more about it at www.bilingualfamily.org . It is fully worth it, I promise you.

As for me, I'll update again soon, but in the meantime, do check out the website and consider subscribing to Multicultural Living.

My little school is growing up

In a week, my first class will graduate from Level 1 to Level 2. This is our inaugural class, the class that started the school, the class that has stuck with us for a whole school year, and has served as our guinea pig class as well as our model class.

This is a big milestone for the kids. They've finished a whole book, they're on to Book 2. While they're still at the beginner stage, they've accomplished something a lot of kids never will. These kids, 7 girls and 1 boy, aged 8-11, have gone from speaking barely any English to being able to introduce themselves, able to make requests, able to say what they're doing and what they like doing, name the rooms in a house and what happens in each room, name clothes and what you wear in hot and cold weather, name the body parts, and a whole lot more. They have a vocabulary of probably 500 or so words, not too bad for eight months! A lot of them have taken a real interest in English, and in their own primary schools have gone from being so-so English students to the top of their class, examples for others.

I'm proud of this class. Their graduation is a milestone not just for the kids, but for our school as well. When this class started, they were our first and only students. We now have over 100 students, kindergarten, primary school, high school and adults. We now have not one, but 12 classes of varying levels. We have new students signing up every day. Our school is, slowly but surely, growing, and this first graduating class was there from the start.

I hope these kids stick with us until they all go off to college, but even if they don't, they'll always have a special place in my heart. I couldn't have made this school what it is without them, and for that, they deserve my thanks.