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Mini Mandarin Musicians is a music and language integrated program created by Yi-Ting Huang. After she and her husband moved to the UK in 2014, they greeted the first child and started to establish their family in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. Yi-Ting took her newborn to attend various activities and classes for young children, and enjoyed the atmosphere of nurturing children under a lively and friendly educational environment. She also appreciated the opportunities to interact with other parents during and after the class time, and realized the importance to understand parents’ opinions regarding individual children’s needs.

 

This experience corresponds to what she had worked on before moving to the UK. Because of her consistent passion for early childhood education, Yi-Ting held an early childhood music class at a local community centre, other than her full-time teaching job in a primary school and part-time lectureship in two universities in Taiwan.

 

As a result of having two French-Taiwanese children (the second one came in 2016!) and living in the UK, Yi-Ting often has conversations with her husband regarding how to create an interesting but natural environment for their children to adapt themselves into this tri-lingual based family. They also value any chances to exchange ideas with other parents who have similar concerns. Due to the lack of resources in learning Mandarin for young children in Warwickshire area as well as the importance of establishing language basics at an early age, Yi-Ting decided to combine her two specialties-music education and Mandarin teaching into a creative and unique program (Mini Mandarin Musicians was established in August, 2015). This is also a valuable way to implement what she had researched and proposed in her dissertation topic-Music integration in the primary school community.