Today we went back to Mei Hua Chinese Language School. We have had the boys taking lessons with a private teacher since last fall, and we really liked her format a lot. The schedule was a much better fit for us as well, but our local Chinese language school changed their preschool format around and we decided to try it again. Instead of having to pay the whole quarter tuition, we can buy a punch card so we only pay for the sessions we use. The class is only an hour long now - from 3 to 4 on Sunday afternoons and they are offering an adult class at the same time. This arrangement is absolutely perfect for us, so we were very excited to try it out. We weren't sure who else would be there, but as we pulled into the parking lot Laurette Rasmussen pulled in with her daughters Lily and Lana. Lana is the little girl Shen knew in Xi'an. Kai and Shen were very excited to see them, and while Shen was a little nervous about Tina and I leaving him in the class, so I asked Lana if Shen could sit between her and Kai. This put him at ease and we went off to the adult class where we worked on Pinyin and tones. When the kids were done they came and found us and we took them out to play on the playground for a bit. We all had a really good time, and look forward to continuing with this program. We hope that more families start to come as well. I think it's a great way for us to improve our Chinese, and to connect with the local Chinese-American community. If you're local and interested, here's the link to the school's website: www.meihuaschool.org.

To augment the experience we played two different Chinese DVD's for the boys today too, one before, and one after school. We watched Follow Jade! Learn Chinese: Let's Go To Market in China, and Play & Learn CHINESE with Mei Mei Vol. 1. So far we have liked the Jade videos better than the Mei-Mei ones, but we had just picked up this Mei-Mei one at the library today and we liked it better than the other ones we have seen from that series.

We still don't feel like we have a good routine in place regarding working on Chinese language with the boys, but we are trying to continually expose them to it. I think having this adult class time for Tina and me will help us to focus more on this.