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From Zero Chinese to National Media: A Student Success Story

We love celebrating real stories of what long-term, high-quality Mandarin immersion can do for children — and one of our students, Davis, recently gave us a beautiful reminder of what’s possible.

Davis was recently selected—along with a small group of public school and international school students—to appear in a Chinese New Year video produced by People’s Daily, one of the most widely read Chinese news outlets in the world. Being featured in a production like this requires not just basic language ability, but true listening, speaking, and cultural confidence.

What makes this even more remarkable is where Davis began.

When Davis first joined our summer camp in 2020, he spoke almost no Mandarin. He was quiet, observant, and soaking everything in while having fun in nature. Over the years, through consecutive summers of immersion and ongoing after-school Mandarin programs during the school year, his Chinese steadily grew from beginner level to near-native fluency.

Today, his Mandarin is strong enough that his family has chosen to relocate to China for a couple of years for work — confident that their children can truly live, learn, and thrive in a Chinese-speaking environment.

His mom recently shared with us:

“We owe the kids’ fluency to your summer camp!”

Our other long time students also speak at near native level like Davis, regardless of their background.

For families who don’t speak Chinese at home, this story is especially important. Davis did not become fluent because of heritage or language spoken at home — he became fluent because of consistent, meaningful immersion over time in a supportive Mandarin-speaking community.

We are incredibly proud of Davis and his family, and grateful to be part of their journey. Stories like this are why we do what we do.

If you watch the video, he is the cute kid with a big smile clapping right before the 3 minute mark. https://share.google/lJi3LX5wmPJZIWKsS  

******Due to popular demand, we have recorded our signature workshops “Be a Master Emotional Coach for Your Child” on how to provide effective emotional coaching for your child at home. Here is the link for the workshop in Mandarin Chinese:

The English version:

We recommend that you listen to it in your native language since it can be quite subtle to grasp.

Our Story

My World Nature School is a Mandarin immersion, 100% outdoor school located in Bellevue, Washington. It was founded out of necessity: when Orien Kuang, a former science editor and mother of two couldn’t find a nature school that was also Mandarin immersion for her bilingual children, she knew she had to take action.

Before Orien’s children were even born, when she was a bilingual science editor at AAAS, the publisher of Journal Science in 2011, one research paper caught her attention: “For kids with ADHD, regular ‘green time’ is linked to milder symptoms“. She dived deep in her research after her oldest was born, and discovered nature schools where the classroom is nature and teachers are facilitators who support children’s lead on learning and playing. When her oldest was just two years old, she co-founded Coho Kids, an English outdoor school, for lack of Chinese speaking children at the time. In  September 2017 when her youngest child turned three and not speaking enough Chinese, she founded the Mandarin immersion My World Nature school.

For a good introduction to nature schools, here is a short video: