My older son is showing a lot of  interest in learning Chinese, and that’s music to my ears.  I would like him to learn Mandarin.  Our family speaks Cantonese, but Mandarin is the official language which I would definitely want him to learn.  I started researching in Chinese school, and my husband is definitely against sending the kids to Saturdays/Sundays Chinese school.  He is a Chinese school drop out, and had bad memories of giving up play time to go to Chinese school.  Weekends are always packed with activities: sports, birthday parties, grandparents visits, social events; so I don’t necessarily disagree with him.

My other idea is to find a Chinese tutor.  I really want this to be an interesting and fun experience for the kids.  My ideal situation is to team up with another family so it’s a few kids together to learn Chinese, they can even play a little after the tutoring session.  I would definitely want this tutor to have experience with kids, and to want to make this learning experience an interesting one.  I started asking around.  I posted a request on one of the yahoo moms group around where I live to see if anyone has any recommendations.  I got some pretty interesting results!  I got ONE recommendation, and I got like TEN responses asking me to share my findings as they are all looking for the same thing.

This reminded me of something.  This is exactly why Debbie and I started My Panda Paws – make learning Chinese fun and educational for the kids.  There’s a pretty good candidates that I am going to call tomorrow, let’s see how it works out.