Chinese American International School Chinese American International
School (CAIS) is a private, independent school in San Francisco’s Hayes
Valley neighborhood. Founded in 1981, with just ten students in the
basement of a University of California Extension building, CAIS is the
earliest Mandarin-English dual-language immersion school in the United
States.international school in Tianjin
The school now enrolls 520 students in grades pre-K through eight on
three campuses: early childhood, lower school, and middle school.
CAIS
follows a 50/50 Chinese/English model in the early childhood and lower
school divisions and a 30/70 model in the middle school. Currently,
classes in grades pre-K through five are staffed by both a lead teacher
and a teaching associate. CAIS was a recipient of the Goldman Sachs
Award for Excellence for International Education in 2005.CAIS employs
full-time curriculum leaders in both English and Chinese who work with
teachers and teaching associates in all three divisions on designing and
delivering an integrated and aligned curriculum in both languages.
In
the early childhood and lower school divisions, and to a lesser degree
in the middle school, the curriculum is organized into integrated units,
with all subjects and both languages integrated under a unified theme.
Examples are “Exploring Living Things” (pre-K); “Everyone can make a
change/Helping Others is the Foundation of Happiness” (3rd grade); and
“Water, Water, Everywhere” (7th grade). CAIS’s curriculum framework
ensures integration across languages and subjects through six “Focuses
of Integration”—lenses through which all subjects can be viewed across
all grades.
Inspired by the IB MYP (International Baccalaureate
Middle Years Programme) “Areas of Integration,” the CAIS “Focuses of
Integration” are Change and Continuity, Environments, Global
Citizenship, Self-Development, Culture, and Innovation and Creativity.
Subjects In the early childhood and lower school divisions, students
learn language arts, social studies, math, and health in Chinese.
Language arts, social studies, math, lab science, and PE are taught in
English, and the visual and performing arts are taught in both
languages, with selection of language dependent on staffing.
The
school has dual language social emotional learning programs both in the
classroom and on the playground. In middle school, language arts and
social studies and some arts classes are taught in Chinese. CAIS employs
a Chinese-speaking educational technology integrator for all divisions,
and technology skills are integrated directly into the curriculum in
all subjects in both Chinese and English. Coding and design are separate
classes taught in English.In CAIS’s play-based early childhood program,
the focus is on oral and aural proficiency within a developmentally
appropriate pre-literacy program. In the lower school, CAIS is moving
increasingly toward a workshop model in both reading and writing that is
aligned between Chinese and English.
In English the school has
implemented reading and writing workshop models from Teachers College at
Columbia University, which have been revised and adapted for the
Chinese classroom. CAIS lower school is also developing a guided reading
program in Chinese, and the school is currently working with a Bay Area
publisher along with a few other immersion schools to pilot a Chinese
guided level reading system. CAIS middle school is also moving to a
workshop model in Chinese writing. CAIS has long contemplated the
relationship between language learning objectives and content knowledge
objectives within immersion instruction. Accordingly, the school has
developed a document entitled “Goals and Principles of Chinese Immersion
Instruction at CAIS,” which defines clearly our approach to immersion
instruction and the relationship between language and content learning.
Our
curriculum maps indicate both language objectives and content
objectives for each curriculum unit. The CAIS curriculum in Chinese is
aligned with the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. In 2012, CAIS changed
from full-form or “traditional” Chinese characters to simplified
characters as the basic script for teaching and learning in the Chinese
language classroom. This transition took place after 31 years of using
the traditional, full-form script.
