Programs – Mandarin Mates

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Small group. Big adventure. Shared together.

Our camps run during Australian school holidays and are designed for children aged 6–12 and their parents to explore China — together.

Each two-week program includes:

Ten school days in a real class, alongside local students (~8:00am–3:50pm, fresh lunch provided)
Mandarin all day — morning meeting, classroom routines, pinyin and characters, plus maths, STEM, music, art and sport taught in Mandarin
Hands-on cultural workshops (dumpling-making, calligraphy)
Weekend visits to iconic sites (Great Wall, Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, hutong walking tour)
Local meals (from fresh school lunches to a group Peking duck dinner)
Relaxed bonding time — no stress, no rush, just presence

2027 Destinations

Beijing — The Great Wall, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, and local hutongs
Chengdu — Panda sanctuary, Sichuan cuisine, and interactive workshops
Xi’an — Terracotta Warriors, ancient city walls, and bike rides
Shanghai — The Bund, French Concession, and modern China in action

Every destination offers the same thoughtful, safe, and inspiring family experience — with new adventures at every turn.

Ready to Join Mandarin Mates

Our 2027 camp is limited to ~10 families.

What’s Included

Ten school days at an International Bilingual School

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Fresh school lunch daily (with local specialties like Peking Duck and family-style banquets)

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Daily group transport between your accommodation and school

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Entry and fees for all weekend activities

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Cultural workshops and materials (dumpling-making, calligraphy)

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Full Mandarin immersion — lessons, routines and playtime

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A bilingual Mandarin Mates team on the ground throughout

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Pre-departure support — school placement, visa checklist, accommodation guidance

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A small group — capped at ~10 families

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Ten school days at an international bilingual school

Your child is enrolled in a real class for ten school days, Monday to Friday across twoweeks. Not a visitors’ group, not a holiday programme run for foreign children. A real class,with local students, following the school’s own timetable.

This is the part that makes the fortnight work. A child who sits in a Mandarin classroomfor two weeks stops translating in their head and starts listening. That does not happen ina language class at home.

Which school

Camp 01 runs with a leading international bilingual school in Chaoyang, Beijing. It is an IBPrimary Years Programme school, WASC accredited, founded in 2002, with more than 400students. Classes are capped under 22 and the student to teacher ratio is 1 to 5.

The campus covers 8,500 square metres and includes a library, art and drama workshops,science inquiry rooms, STEAM spaces, a music room, a lecture hall, a sports field and an outdoor playground.

How the ten days are structured

The school follows an IB PYP curriculum taught alongside the Chinese National Curriculum. Your child’s week is built from these blocks:

Block	Chinese	What it covers	Roughly per week
Chinese Language	中文	Speaking, reading, listening, vocabulary	5 sessions
Chinese Math	数学	Maths taught in Mandarin	4-5 sessions
Pinyin Foundations	拼音	Pronunciation, romanisation, sound decoding	3 sessions
Cultural Special	文化体验	Calligraphy, art, music, festivals	3 sessions
Character Study	汉字	Recognising and writing Chinese characters	1 session

Alongside these, your child joins the school’s fegulaf Units of Inquiry, STEAM, PSPE, Music, Art and Library sessions with their class.

What if my child speaks no Mandarin?

Most children joining us will not. The school’s teachers work with beginners every year, and children are placed at their own level. Pinyin Foundations exists precisely for children starting from zero.

Placement

We handle the enrollment and placement with the school before you travel. You tell us your child’s age and any Mandarin they already have, and we work with the school on the right class. You do not deal with the school’s admissions process yourself.

What you get during the day

Our team sends a daily update with photos of the children at school and what they have been doing. You will know how the day went before your child gets back.

Fresh school lunch daily

Fresh school lunch daily

A hot lunch is prepared fresh at school every day and is included in the fee. Your child eats what the other children eat, at the same tables.

This is a small thing that turns out to matter. Sharing a meal with classmates is where a lot of the language actually happens, and it is often where children first relax.

Dietary requirements and allergies

Tell us at registration. We confirm every requirement directly with the school before you travel, and we come back to you with what the school can and cannot accommodate. We will not tell you it is handled until we have that in writing from them.

If the school cannot safely manage a particular allergy, we will say so before you book rather than after.

Other meals

School lunch is the meal included on weekdays. Breakfasts and weekday dinners are your own, and Beijing makes that easy. Group meals on the weekends are included and are listed separately under weekend activities.

Daily group transport between your accommodation and school

A private bus collects the children each morning and brings them back each afternoon. It is included in the fee and it is supervised by our team, not left to the driver.

How the morning works

We give you a shortlist of vetted hotels and serviced apartments near the school before you book. The bus runs a fixed route between those hotels, which is why we ask families to choose from the list.

Pickup runs between 7:50am and 8:00am, doing the rounds hotel to hotel.
A Mandarin Mates team member is on the bus for every run. Children are checked on at pickup and again on arrival at school.
The bus drops directly at the school gate.
Once the children are inside, you get a message confirming they have arrived.

The afternoon run reverses it. Children are collected from school, accompanied on the bus, and returned to your hotel.

You will know what is happening

Our team sends daily updates through the group chat, including photos of the children heading into school and what they have been doing during the day. You are not waiting until 4pm wondering how it went.

If you are running late

Message the team on WeChat. Someone answers. If your child misses the bus we sort out getting them to school, we do not leave you to work it out in a city where you may not speak the language.

Why this matters

Getting a seven year old across Beijing at 8am, in January, without Mandarin, is the single most stressful part of doing this independently. Taking it off your plate is most of what the on-the-ground team is for.

Entry and fees for all weekend activities

Every weekend activity is included: entry tickets, group transport, guides and the group meals listed below. There is nothing to pay on the day and no optional extras dressed up as part of the itinerary.

Weekends are when the families are together. Weekdays your child is at school and your time is your own. Saturdays and Sundays, everyone goes out as a group.

Weekend 1

Day	What we do
Saturday	The Great Wall at Mutianyu, including the cable car and a group lunch
Sunday	Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and Jingshan Park

Weekend 2

Day	What we do
Saturday	A hutong walking tour, then the Summer Palace
Sunday	Dumpling-making and calligraphy workshops, then a farewell Peking duck dinner

Evenings

Optional and relaxed: a welcome get-together at the start, a night market stroll, a cultural show, and casual group dinners through the fortnight. Come to what suits you. Nobody is counting.

A January note

Beijing in January is cold and clear, which is a good thing for the Wall. Two weather- dependent items: the Mutianyu toboggan and the boats on Kunming Lake may not run. Everything else goes ahead regardless.

Getting around

Group transport to and from every weekend activity is included. You are not navigating the subway with tired children.

Cultural workshops and materials

Hands-on sessions where families make something together. All materials are included.

Dumpling-making

Everyone makes them, parents included, and the results vary wildly. Children who have eaten dumplings their whole lives find out what actually goes into them, and it turns out folding is harder than it looks.

Calligraphy and paper-cutting

Brush, ink, paper. Your child writes characters they have been learning at school all fortnight, which is when the writing stops being homework and starts being something they made. The paper-cuts come home with you.

Inside school as well

Cultural sessions are part of the school week too, under the school’s Cultural Special block: art, music, festivals and calligraphy taught as part of the curriculum rather than as a tourist activity.

What you take home

Whatever your family makes. The workshops are built so that children finish with something in their hands, which matters more than it sounds when they are explaining the trip to their friends in February.

Full Mandarin immersion: lessons, routines and playtime

The immersion is not just the lessons. It is the morning greeting, the instructions from the teacher, the queue for lunch and the shouting in the playground. That is where a language actually goes in.

A typical day

Time	What happens
7:50am to 8:00am	Bus pickup from your hotel, accompanied by our team

Time	What happens
8:30am	School starts. Morning meeting and classroom routines, in Mandarin
Through the day	Chinese Language, Chinese Math, Pinyin Foundations, Character Study, plus the school’s Units of Inquiry, STEAM, Music, Art, PSPE and Library
Lunch	Fresh hot lunch at school with classmates
3:00pm	Formal school day ends
3:00pm to 5:00pm	Extra-curricular activities
After 5:00pm	Bus back to your hotel, accompanied by our team

Extra-curricular activities, 3:00pm to 5:00pm

Included in the fee. Children choose from the school’s after-school programme, which typically includes options such as robotics, soccer, calligraphy and martial arts. The full activity list for January is being confirmed with the school and will be shared with families before departure.

Why immersion rather than lessons

A weekly Mandarin class teaches a child about Chinese. Two weeks in a Chinese classroom teaches them to use it. The difference shows up when they need to ask where the toilet is, or work out what the teacher just said, or join a game at lunch. There is no option to switch back to English, and that is the whole point.

Will my child cope

The first two days are the hard ones. By the end of the first week most children have found their footing, and by the second week they are correcting your pronunciation. Teachers are experienced with children who arrive with no Mandarin, and your child is not the only newcomer.

And you are in the same city, contactable all day, not on the other side of the world.

A bilingual Mandarin Mates team on the ground throughout

All three founders are in Beijing for the full fortnight, with our China-based team alongside them. Our own children are on this camp, in the same classrooms as yours.

Who is there

Who	What they do
Garry and Cassie	Founders, both in Beijing for the fortnight
Anthony	Co-founder, in Beijing for the fortnight
Our China team	Day to day coordination: bus runs, school liaison, the group chat, anything that comes up

Between us we have over 20 years across early childhood education, bilingual learning and international school programmes. Two of the team worked in bilingual early childhood education in Beijing. We also run a licensed early education centre in Sydney.

How you reach us

WeChat, in the group chat we set up before you travel. In China that is how everything works, and messages get answered quickly rather than at the next scheduled check-in.

For anything urgent, someone is reachable around the clock for the whole fortnight. For everything else, which is most things, you will usually get an answer within minutes.

What we actually do all fortnight

Supervise the bus runs morning and afternoon. Liaise with the school. Send daily updates with photos. Run the weekend activities. Translate when you need it. Sort out the problems that come up in a foreign city, which is the part you cannot plan for and the reason we are there.

Our children are on this camp too

The honest version of why this matters: we designed the fortnight for our own kids first. We are not sending your family somewhere we would not send ours.

Pre-departure support

The months before you travel are where most of the work is, and we do it with you. Booking a fortnight in Beijing with a seven year old involves a hundred small decisions, and you should not have to make them alone.

What we help with

School placement. We handle enrolment with the school. You tell us your child’s age and any Mandarin they have, we do the rest.
Accommodation. A vetted shortlist of hotels and serviced apartments near the school, at a range of price points. You book directly, so you keep the choice and the price control. The bus route is built around this list.
Flights. Which routes work, which airport, what timing gets you in without a brutal first day.
Airport transfers. We can arrange pickup on arrival and drop-off on departure.
Getting online. Practical help with a VPN and phone setup before you go, because a lot of what you use daily does not work in China.
Entry requirements. We walk you through what you need for your passports before you book anything.
Packing. Beijing in January is properly cold. We send a list that assumes you have never packed for that.
Day to day practicalities. Paying for things, getting around, ordering food, the handful of phrases that make the first week easier.

Travel insurance

Required for every traveller. Families arrange their own and confirm cover before departure. Two things we tell everyone: declare the school attendance to your insurer in writing before you buy, and check that your policy covers the after-school activities your child chooses.

How it works

Once you are booked you get an information pack, and we stay available by email and phone through to departure. Closer to the date we set up the group chat so families can meet each other before they land.

A small group, capped at 10 families

Camp 01 takes 5 to 10 families. That is the whole cohort, and we will not add an eleventh.

Why so small

This is our first camp. A small group is the only honest way to run a first one. Ten families is a number we can genuinely look after: we know every child’s name, every dietary requirement, every family’s situation, and we can fix things quickly when they come up.

It also works better for the children. A handful of newcomers spread across classes join in properly. Thirty would turn into a visiting group that sticks together and speaks English, which is exactly what we are trying to avoid.

What it means for you

Your child joins a real class rather than a group of visitors
Weekend activities move at a family pace, not a coach-tour pace
Our team knows your family, not your booking reference
You travel with a small group of Australian families and usually come home knowing them

Being straight about it

January 2027 is our first camp, so there are no past parents to vouch for us yet. That is precisely why we capped it. We would rather run one small fortnight properly than a big one badly, and our own children are in it.

Every child has a parent with them

This is not a drop-off camp. Every child travels with at least one parent for the whole fortnight. During school hours they are with their class. The rest of the time they are with you.