Getting Ready
Woke up at 2:30 AM. It is nice to awaken at a weird time because I called Michael. It was afternoon back in Colorado and it was good to hear his voice.
At the school I met with Jennie, the curriculum director. I was able to explain to her how TPR Storytelling should create different instructional techniques but also that the curriculum should be based on what the students can do rather than list discrete details of a language program. She understood the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. Since she is the curriculum director, she was eager to see the Mandarin curriculum link with proficiency guidelines.
The Mandarin teachers were having a day-long meeting with the Mandarin teachers from Hong Kong International School. By the time I got there, Nini Nam had already spoken. WangFang was speaking about the AP class and character-writing. After lunch, Paul spoke about his music and skits with elementary kids. He had made excellent materials and we all loved his demonstration.
Then I hastily worked with LanYing to get ready for embedded reading in Mandarin. We needed at least three hours to do the preparation but I did not have enough time. LanYing generously offered to write the script, put it into a Keynote presentation, and send it to me! Wow!
Meanwhile I went to dinner with Tom and YingYing Reed, and WangFang in the Bund. We went to a fabulous Hunan Restaurant. The picture shows me with one of the kids who greeted us at the door. After dinner we took a lovely night-time walk through the Waldorf-Astoria and the Peace Hotels. The Bund was so pretty all lit up!
I got back to the hotel exhausted but needed to go through my slides one more time; the workshop starts tomorrow! YingYing says there will be 120 people!