Our children speak fluent Mandarin, having attended local mandarin schools since they first started school. The youngest is 6 and the oldest is now 13. We speak English at home because Mom and Dad are far behind the kids in terms of Chinese…our third grader is much better than we are. We’ve recently found out that we will be relocated to Europe starting in the summer for 18 months, and then will be returning back to Taiwan where they would go back to local school. Our big concern is keeping up the kids’ Chinese while we are in Europe. While the kids are fluent Mandarin speakers/readers/writers, we do speak English at home and Mom & Dad are in no position to help them keep their Mandarin up.
Our hope while in Europe, since my husband’s job will require that we relocate 3-4 times during that period to different parts of Europe (and thus enrolling them in a regular English-speaking school is impractical and very expensive as we’ve looked at it more closely), is to find a Mandarin-speaking teacher/tutor to accompany us, live in our home and home-school the kids enough that at the very least they keep up their Chinese and might have to move back one grade, and in the best case, stay up with their peers in local school, since in theory they can be more efficient studyers if home-schooled in a small group setting.
The tutor job would be a pretty neat experience, we think, as the tutor would have plenty of time to see the parts of Europe we are living in, and would have time for self-travel as well. We are thinking that tutoring only need to be 3 or so days per week, and could even be one week on, one week off. The other days, we’d home-school them in English. Still lots of thinking to do there. Of course, salary will need to be appropriate for the tutoring role, but there is a side benefit of a “year out” for the right candidate, and housing and food would be provided.
So my question…where do we start in looking for a qualified teacher/tutor? Our requirements would include relevant teaching experience and familiarity with Primary and Middle School local requirements, college-educated, enough English that the tutor would feel comfortable getting around in Europe as necessary, adventurous and engaging, good with kids, non-smoking, flexible, dependable, etc.
Any thoughts where to start looking for someone? All suggestions welcome! We are kind of at a loss on how best to do these. We are concerned that if we just drop Mandarin entirely for a year+, it will be harder fitting back in, plus the kids do need to keep busy at least part-time with school.
