Editor’s Note: For parents interested in learning more about bilingual education in the city, New York Family is hosting a special seminar featuring a great panel of experts–including Sharon Huang of Bilingual Buds–on Wednesday, March 16. For more details, click here.
At first glance, the brightly lit preschool classroom looks
like any other–blocks for building, markers for coloring, students prattling
away. But instead of the English alphabet, these walls are covered in Chinese
characters, and students offer up their answers in Mandarin. This is Bilingual
Buds, a new Mandarin Chinese immersion nursery school on the Upper West Side.
On this cold February day, the students are celebrating
Chinese New Year by making dumplings, singing songs and learning traditional
dances. This interactive learning is part of founder Sharon Huang’s goal for
the school’s 40-plus students to learn more than a language—she wants them to
become global citizens.
Seven years ago an expectant Huang was searching for
language-learning choices for her twin sons, Ethan and Warren. Huang, a Queens
native born to immigrant parents from Taiwan, spent her childhood learning
Chinese on the weekends. But when she went abroad for work, she found her
language skills lacking.
“I didn’t want my own kids to be in the same situation,” she
explains. “My dream is for them to be completely fluent, to cross borders and
to work in Chinese, and ideally Spanish down the road, and for a whole
generation of American kids to be able to be bilingual, trilingual.”
The very next year, Bilingual Buds held its first class in
Huang’s basement in New Jersey. Six years later, the flagship school in Summit,
New Jersey provides Spanish and Mandarin immersion to over 100 students. The
Manhattan location will celebrate its one-year anniversary in May, and
currently offers programs for ages 2 through 10, from Mommy and Me classes to
summer camps.
“We’ve been able to take a lot of the best practices that
we’ve learned over the six years and bring them here,” she says. “Our teachers
are able to benefit from all of that learning.”
According to Huang, immersion counts for only about four
percent of the language programs in the country, and Chinese accounts for a
small portion of that.
“We’re so unique,” Huang says, “I could probably count on
one hand the number of programs in the entire country that start at this age
with immersion in Chinese.”
Almost 80 percent of the day’s lessons are taught in
Mandarin, which leaves about 30 minutes dedicated to English. The Chinese and
English teachers collaborate so the students are introduced to similar subjects
in the different languages. What’s more, the emphasis on Chinese hasn’t
adversely affected the students’ English skills in the years that the school
has been in place. In fact, Huang says their students are usually ahead of their
peers in all subjects because of the small class sizes.
“[Language is] the medium for which you’re learning about
other things—you’re learning science, you’re learning how to count and all
that’s being done in Chinese,” she says. “So you’re learning interesting
things, it’s just that you’re learning it through a language.”
Language immersion schools are sprinkled throughout New York
City, but Bilingual Buds is the only one to offer Mandarin. The students here
are a mixture of backgrounds and ethnicities; some have Asian parents, others
were adopted from an Asian country and still others have virtually no ties to
Asian culture. But these parents have one thing in common: they want their
children to be prepared for a world where China’s economy and influence is growing
fast.
“China is projected to be number one by the time this crop
of kids reach college age,” Huang says. “So when this crop of kids is ready to
find a job, they’d better speak Mandarin.”
Alicia Chin is a Bilingual Buds parent and strong supporter.
A mother of two, Chin has enrolled both her children in the school and serves
as communication director. Her son, Camden, had been enrolled in language
classes in New York and New Jersey when, at age four, he lost interest.
“They seemed just so disconnected to his life and he was
shutting down,” Chin says. “So when I discovered the school, we just jumped in
feet first with all of us and that’s sort of a life decision that’s changed
everything.”
Although Camden was enrolled mid-school year, Chin says she
wasn’t concerned about him not catching on. She says parents often worry about
that the teacher will tell their child to get their coat and they won’t
understand, but it’s these basic steps and routine practices that help instill
the language.
“The first day of anything is pretty intimidating, but once
that’s in place, they just take off,” she says.
Camden’s first day surrounded by the language was accompanied
by bonding with his classmates over Legos, a perfect example of why Huang
believes that the younger children are, the more open they are to learning and
new experiences.
Huang calls the time before the age of seven the “critical
window of language learning.” She believes if a child learns a language during
this period, they learn it as they would a first language.
To read a Chinese newspaper with comprehension requires
knowledge of about 5,000 characters, according to Huang. Sounds daunting, but
walk into a Bilingual Buds classroom and you will see six-year-olds recognizing
the characters for the animals of the zodiac calendar—these students are well
on their way to making each and every one of those crucial characters second
nature.
“Learning language as a child in preschool is a very
different experience than learning language as an adult in a class,” Huang
says. “They’re doing it with teachers who are naturally playing with them. They
don’t know that it’s hard because they’re starting it so young.”
Bilingual Buds, 175 Riverside Boulevard at West 68th
Street, 212-787-8088, bilingualbudsnyc.com.
Photo by Brianna McClane
