欢迎大家预约参观幼儿园！
我们要公布一个殷切期待振奋人心的好消息！——Hatching Dragons现已正式获得Ofsted（英国教育标准局）的审核批准, 我们的全英首家中英双语全日制幼儿园开学日将于5月5日正式拉开帷幕！
大家记得要尽快在我们的网页（http://www.hatching-dragons.com/?q=register-now）办理免费的入学注册, 以享受仅剩的四个优惠学位.
另外，我们幼儿园将会继续安排额外的开放日以方便更多需要参观和了解我们的家长,请浏览我们网站上的幼儿园活动安排（http://www.hatching-dragons.com/?q=events-0）并联系我们的办公室进行预约参观.
Recruitment
Dear all,
We’re proud to announce that we’re finally opening our first bilingual mandarin-english early years setting in the Barbican on Tuesday 5th of May 2015. We are in the process of recruiting qualified teachers who have specialism in the early years (reception teachers etc), particularly those who can speak Mandarin so thought I’d reach out to the network to see if anyone is looking and anyone is central. Emphasis on qualifications, visas, early years experience (reception) and in-depth knowledge of the intercultural challenge
You can find more information on who we are on our website (www.hatching-dragons.com) and you can see some lovely pictures of our setting https://www.flickr.com/photos/130322239@N03/. We have a part time - full place available immediately for those interested, please do get in touch and send your CV to us: [email protected].
Best Regards,
Hatching Dragons
我们已经5月5日开始上课了，有兴趣的大家请联系办公室进行预约参观，谢谢！
大家有需要的请联系我们安排参观，谢谢！
欢迎大家联系！
我们上泰晤士报啦！
英国泰晤士报-09/06/2015
Our toddler is fluent in Mandarin. Is yours? – The new nursery checklist
Ben Machell
Published at 12:01AM, June 9 2015
What do you look for when choosing a nursery for your child? As the father of an eight-month-old son, it’s a question I’ve been preoccupied with for a while. . You traipse round the open days, admire the finger paintings and secretly run through an internal checklist. Do the people running the place seem actually to like children? How much outside space is there? Can my son take his stuffed zebra every day? Will he learn how to speak Mandarin? Does the food look healthy? That sort of thing.
Hang on. Parents don’t choose a nursery because they want their kids to learn Mandarin. Do they? Well, as of last month, a growing number do. May marked the opening of Hatching Dragons, the UK’s first bilingual Mandarin-English day nursery, housed in an airy church hall not far from the Barbican Centre, in London. On entering, it seems like any number of nurseries I’ve visited recently. Toddlers are running round in endless circles. There’s a soft play area with a plastic slide. Pieces of abstract artwork are proudly displayed on the walls. Then you start to notice little details. The room is decorated with paper lanterns and Chinese dragons. Noodles are served for lunch (no chopsticks, though: health and safety) after which there will be a shadow puppetry performance. And the staff? They are predominantly Chinese and employ a 50:50 split between English and Mandarin when speaking to the children, the vast majority of whom come from households where no Mandarin is spoken.
Hatching Dragons is the brainchild of Cennydd John, who previously ran an educational consultancy helping Chinese students get into British and American universities. In 2013 he found himself going through the process of finding a nursery for his young son and he gradually concluded that, for the money — often upwards of £20,000 a year in London — at most nurseries, your child isn’t really getting anything they couldn’t get at home. Shouldn’t they be offering more?
“I thought, what are these places really doing outside of caring for our child and doing what any normal parent would do?” says John. “So I started thinking about what I would value in a nursery environment. I’d been to China, studied at a Chinese university but I’d then struggled with the language since. And so it dawned on me that having an immersion experience between the ages of nought and five would be a way for my son to pick up Mandarin immediately and naturally.”
This is important to understand. Mandarin is not “taught” here — there’s no hothousing or any kind of formal lessons. The idea is that they gradually pick it up as a result of being exposed to it at a young age. This immersion approach is nothing new and nurseries throughout the capital offer the same experience with French. Indeed, parents will often hire nannies who speak a foreign language for that reason. What Hatching Dragons hopes is that more and more parents will look at the world today and conclude that it makes sense to give their children a grounding in what is already the most widely spoken language in the world. Almost 17 per cent of the planet’s population are native Mandarin speakers. For English, the figure is about 5 per cent. Poor old French limps in at barely 1 per cent.
Another advantage to learning Mandarin when you’re young is that it gets much, much harder the older you get. In other words, if you’re going to do it, do it early. “When the Chinese see a foreigner speak our language, they are very impressed, because they think it must be impossible,” says Li Jing, one of the nursery staff. The biggest leap for the children, she says, is understanding that Mandarin is a tonal language, and that the same word can have different meanings if spoken with different intonations. “We have four tones, so it’s quite different to English. But I don’t think it’s too much of a problem for them.”
Perhaps the greatest draw to Mandarin right now is China’s march towards economic superpower status. According to the IMF, it is now the world’s largest economy, and no bones were made about this when last year it was revealed that the language would be added to the national curriculum.
“China’s growing economy brings huge business opportunities for Britain and it is vital that more of our young people can speak Mandarin to be able to trade in a global market and to develop successful companies,” the government announced. Even the Hatching Dragons website quietly points out that last year UK-Chinese trade topped £43 billion. In the US there are now almost 200 English-Mandarin bilingual nurseries in operation. “It’s a geopolitical point,” says John. “America and China are fully aware of each other, but I think we’re a little bit behind the curve. In the UK, I think we’re only just starting to reassess how we can engage with China on our own terms.”
But do parents really think about geopolitics when choosing their childcare? From speaking to them, the answer is, in a roundabout way, yes. While none will admit to having fantasies of their children doing multibillion dollar deals in Shanghai by the age of 19 (and I did ask them all), they do concede that, linguistically, they can see which way the wind is blowing.
Khairoun Abji is here with her 19-month-old daughter Ursula, who has recently started to greet the family dogs with a cheerful “nĭ hăo” (“hello!”). A digital project manager, Abji says that she recently had to liaise with a factory in China that was shipping several million pounds worth of products to the UK. “And it would have been very useful to have had someone on our team who spoke Mandarin. The fact that the Chinese team managed all the translation was kind of embarrassing. It didn’t reflect well on the British as language learners.”
Abji says that her decision to send Ursula to Hatching Dragons has raised some eyebrows. “A friend described it as ‘helicopter parenting’, which is when you sweep in, grab the youngster and drop them from high-quality experience to high-quality experience. And I suppose that if was a half-hour session of Mandarin and then we dashed off to baby yoga then yes, you could accuse me of that. But it doesn’t feel like that at all,” she says. “Everything here is like any good nursery, it’s just done in two languages. It’s not Hogwarts for Mandarin.”
Another mother, Win Kwok, who works as a designer, grew up in Hong Kong speaking English and Cantonese. While she will speak to her daughter, Ella, in Cantonese for cultural reasons, she accepts that Mandarin is going to be “much more practical for her” down the line.
“We have a nanny who speaks to her in Mandarin and she also comes here to support that,” she says. “Mandarin speaking nannies are not particularly cheap and we live 45 minutes drive from the nursery, but it’s something I’m prepared to invest in for Ella. Everything about it makes sense. Why would you not want your child to learn another language? And with the rising importance of China, why not Mandarin?”
Still, the parents acknowledge that at this early stage in their children’s lives, the advantages of being immersed in a second language is perhaps more developmental than practical.
Alexandra Brown is here with her daughter, Ariadne, who turns one this month. “My husband and I are lawyers and in the international world in which we work, we’re aware of China’s growing importance in the world,” she says. “But the benefits of taking my daughter here might not necessarily be that she ends up speaking Mandarin, but that the ability to cope with two languages stays with her. It’s the cognitive toolkit. If she ends up speaking fluent Mandarin by the time she’s a teenager? Wow, that would be amazing. But I think that might be a little bit optimistic.”
Although speaking to John, perhaps it’s not. “Our longer-term plans are not just nurseries,” he says. “This is a first step towards primary schools and secondary schools here in the UK. We’re looking at two sites at the moment for primary schools to continue the bilingual approach.”
Places at Hatching Dragons are not cheap, although John points out that their staff overheads are high because of the extra Mandarin speakers they employ. He says that if you wanted 50 hours a week for a child aged between three and five, you’d pay a little over £6.50 an hour (about £17,000 per year), which say probably means my son won’t be speaking Mandarin any time soon. He explains that Hatching Dragons is setting up nurseries in China and that, the previous month, he received an email enquiring about the possibility of setting-up a trilingual nursery in Chile, where English, Mandarin and Spanish would be spoken. He doesn’t seem surprised.
“The world is getting increasingly mobile, interconnected, intercultural and multilingual,” he says. “And if you can school your child to not only adapt to that, but to communicate with these people in their own language, then that’s hugely powerful. I defy any parent not to see the advantage of that.”
Hatching Dragons是英国第一家全中英双语幼年教育机构，旨在为父母和孩子们提供最舒适的高质量幼儿学习环境， 我们希望孩子们能同时发展语言技能和跨文化理解，因为我们知道他们将来需要面对的是一个越来越灵活的多语种和多元文化世界。加上由我们的Ofsted(英国教育标准局)前主席，早年教育领导成员及中英文专家所引领的团队，我们知道这个夏天正是为您的宝宝提供的最好的夏令营体验……
Hatching Dragons夏令营特色
·我们以生动有趣的学前教育经验和渗透式中英学习环境，同时通过音乐，歌曲，舞蹈，皮影戏等等多样形式发挥中国文化，帮助孩子们自然习得双语
·孩子们每天能亲身体验我们精心策划适合不同年龄层的丰富多彩的跨文化课堂活动
·每天能享受我们专业厨师精心研制给小朋友中西结合的美味餐饮，包括上午的点心，可口营养的午餐，午后的点心和特色下午茶
·参与我们别出心裁的周五文化交流Party
·每天有机会学习最具代表性的中国民族舞和英国传统歌舞，以及融入趣味无穷的互动游戏，具文化特色的各式手工活动，中国皮影戏，英国角色扮演戏剧等等…数之不尽的活动都紧紧围绕EYFS（英国早期教育体系）制定，换而言之，您的孩子吸收到的不仅仅是语言的能力，并且揽括了EYFS的七大领域(语言和交流/身体发展/个人社会和情感发展/数学/读写能力/了解世界/表现艺术与设计)以最大的程度全面发展。
报名说明：
- Hatching Dragons夏令营时间/日期：8月3日-8月28日 8:30am-18:30pm（周末休息）
为配合工作忙碌的家长们，夏令营参与形式可在一周或整个八月里灵活选择半天或全天 - 报名方式及表格链接：http://www.hatching-dragons.com/?q=register-now
费用会根据选择的天数或时间调整，与幼儿园的正常托管收费一致，详细咨询请联系Hatching Dragons办公室。 - 报名名额有限，截止日期为2015年7月31日。
- 每周的课程都不一样，内容安排或根据孩子年龄和人数，天气等情况变化而进行调整。
- 夏令营一切活动都将严格按照Ofsted(英国教育标准局)的规定执行，为保证活动安全顺利进行，请遵守幼儿园的一切规定。
- 请随时联系我们以获取更多相关信息，联系方式：
Tel: 020 3287 7020
Email： [email protected]
网站: www.hatching-dragons.com
微信公众号：HatchingDragons
微信联系人：李老师（jingjingli1127）； 庄先生（cennjohn）
夏令营地址Hatching Dragons Barbican 校园内:
1 Viscount Street,
London
EC1Y 0AA
Hatching Dragons夏令营八月开始了！大家请争取最后的报名机会哦！
·我们以生动有趣的学前教育经验和渗透式中英学习环境，同时通过音乐，歌曲，舞蹈，皮影戏等等多样形式发挥中国文化，帮助孩子们自然习得双语
·孩子们每天能亲身体验我们精心策划适合不同年龄层的丰富多彩的跨文化课堂活动
·每天能享受我们专业厨师精心研制给小朋友中西结合的美味餐饮，包括上午的点心，可口营养的午餐，午后的点心和特色下午茶
·参与我们别出心裁的周五文化交流Party
·每天有机会学习最具代表性的中国民族舞和英国传统歌舞，以及融入趣味无穷的互动游戏，具文化特色的各式手工活动，中国皮影戏，英国角色扮演戏剧等等…数之不尽的活动都紧紧围绕EYFS（英国早期教育体系）制定，换而言之，您的孩子吸收到的不仅仅是语言的能力，并且揽括了EYFS的七大领域(语言和交流/身体发展/个人社会和情感发展/数学/读写能力/了解世界/表现艺术与设计)以最大的程度全面发展。
·我们新开设了游玩伦敦城的系列课外活动，包括St Pauls, Tate Modern, St Giles, Golden Lane Campus, Barbican Centre and St Lukes Symphony 等等…整个夏令营将让您的宝贝惊喜不断！
报名说明：
- Hatching Dragons夏令营时间/日期：8月3日-8月28日 8:30am-18:30pm（周末休息）
为配合工作忙碌的家长们，夏令营参与形式可在一周或整个八月里灵活选择半天或全天 - 报名方式及表格链接：http://www.hatching-dragons.com/?q=register-now
费用会根据选择的天数或时间调整，与幼儿园的正常托管收费一致，详细咨询请联系Hatching Dragons办公室。 - 报名名额有限，截止日期为2015年7月31日。
- 每周的课程都不一样，内容安排或根据孩子年龄和人数，天气等情况变化而进行调整。
- 夏令营一切活动都将严格按照Ofsted(英国教育标准局)的规定执行，为保证活动安全顺利进行，请遵守幼儿园的一切规定。
- 请随时联系我们以获取更多相关信息，联系方式：
Tel: 020 3287 7020
Email： [email protected]
网站: www.hatching-dragons.com
微信公众号：HatchingDragons
夏令营地址Hatching Dragons Barbican 校园内:
1 Viscount Street,
London
EC1Y 0AA
Hatching Dragons 诚邀您参与我们的市场调查，非常感谢您的关注，谢谢！
你们雇做marketing的人不~;P 自荐个
完全理解你的点。你就是太认真了，认真得让人家下不来台！
支持，我也觉得有的回帖有点吹毛求疵了。