literacy | Utah Mandarin Immersion Parent Council

Literacy is the ability to read AND write in a language. But often schools focus predominantly on reading, neglecting critical writing skills.

There’s debate in academic circles on how best to achieve literacy – in traditional and immersion classrooms. Achieving literacy in Chinese, a non-alphabetic language with thousands of characters, adds degrees of difficulty.

Here’s one school’s idea, a calligraphy program that helps students engage with the characters.

Everyone learns differently. But as a professional writer, I believe people learn to write by writing. Following are some cute tutorials on Chinese characters that my son’s teacher shared with us this year. Give them a try at home with your kids.

Another idea pioneered by one of our council representatives, Vanessa Shiba at Lone Peak, was to create a pen pal program between two immersion schools.

Chinese Characters:

The Story of Chinese Character : 人