Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008
The first time 10-year-old Maggie More slipped up and spoke Chinese at home, her mother was stunned.
"I handed something to her and she said "thank you" in Chinese," said Jennifer More of Frederick.
A few years ago, her daughter had taken six Chinese classes at an after-school program at the Friends Meeting School.
But Maggie really immersed herself in Chinese language and culture this summer, as she completed a three-week-long Chinese summer program at Frederick County Public Schools.
She and another 30 Frederick County middle-schoolers studied Chinese phrases, words and symbols, wrote their names in Chinese characters, sang Chinese songs, tried Chinese martial arts and learned about Chinese inventions, such as paper and printing.
And in the process, they became comfortable pronouncing basic expressions and using simple words in Chinese.
"I am amazed at how much she has picked up," Jennifer More said. "Part of their homework was to get their parents to repeat a new word three times. By the end of it, she was snickering at the way I was pronouncing them."
The program, which wrapped up with a final project presentations by students on Aug. 1, served Frederick County students from public and private schools, as well as a couple of students who are being home-schooled.
It evolved out of the Maryland State Department of Education's Summer Center in Chinese Studies Û a Frederick-based initiative providing Chinese classes for gifted students.
But thanks to a federal grant from the National Foreign Language Center, the program this year was expanded to three weeks and for a first time was free for all students.
For the first time, the course was open to middle-school students of all skill levels this summer, rather than gifted students only.
"Our three-week program was far more rigorous than the two-week summer center," said Susan Murphy foreign languages curriculum specialist for Frederick County schools. "We were able to learn from what we had done before."
The &#e6;51,709 federal Startalk grant also allowed the program to focus specifically on students from Frederick County. In comparison, when the program was funded by the state, it was open to gifted students from Frederick, Harford, Allegheny and Washington counties, Murphy said.
While the school system has no specific plans for changes in the program next year, Murphy said the program will most likely have the same format as this year with possibly more students taking the summer course next year.
"The idea is to make students and the community aware that Chinese is not that hard to learn," Murphy said.
Ruby Costea, who taught one of the two Chinese classes in the program this summer, said that with two exceptions most of her students had no background in Chinese.
Yet Costea said her students had no problems learning numbers, the words for different family members, basic greetings and a few Chinese characters.
Because of the Olympics in Beijing this year, Costea also taught her students phrases allowing students to say which Olympic disciplines they like or dislike.
Learning about Chinese culture was also a major part of the program, Costea said. Students learned about the Chinese art of paper folding, they made masks, and practiced calligraphy. Every Friday, students from the program would take field trips to Washington, D.C., to eat Chinese food in Chinatown and saw Chinese art exhibits at the Freer Gallery of Art.
