Our Teachers and Staff

BinBin Laoshi: Head Teacher & Founder

Teacher BinBin graduated with a B.A. in Early Childhood Education from East China Normal University in Shanghai, China, which is one of the top teaching schools in the country.  She has over twelve years of experience as a head teacher at preschools in both Shanghai and San Francisco, enabling her to provide the children with a happy, caring and stimulating environment in which to master all kinds of skills.  She showed great promise from early on and won the title of “Star of Hope” in the “Young Teacher Teaching Competition” the first year after she graduated from college, and she also won the second prize in the “Preschool Environment Innovative Classroom Environment Competition” in Shanghai.  She possesses and maintains a California Early Childhood Education Site Supervisor Permit and undergoes substantial continuing education to make sure that Fun With Mandarin continues to benefit from the best Early Childhood Education concepts available. 

In her work as a teacher she always strives to be creative, nurturing and patient.  She is a teacher because she enjoys helping others to achieve success.  She wants her students to experience meaningful, interesting, and practical learning.  She believes this can be accomplished through the use of hands-on/minds-on activities, cooperative learning, an integrated curriculum, and, when useful to enhance learning, technology and the Internet.

It is her goal to combine her range of experience with her ability to be a compassionate, enthusiastic, and conscientious teacher in order to create the best environment for the children's learning and development.  She greatly enjoys her time with the children each day. 

Binbin Lashi is also fully CPR and first-aid certified.  

Li Laoshi: Mandarin Teacher

Li Laoshi is very well-trained in Early Childhood Education and has a wealth of experience with teaching young children.  In addition to those factors, we also feel that her very positive personality and obviously great love for children and joy in being around them really helps her stand out as an ideal teacher for our school.  Each day she relishes the opportunity to share her love with the children and spread love to them as she constantly strives to make a lasting and positive difference in their lives through her chosen area of expertise.

She has more than twenty years of experience teaching preschool-aged children.  She excels at teaching Mandarin and helping children to enjoy the learning process.  We feel very fortunate to have found a teacher with her ideal combination of experience, education, and character.

In her many years of teaching preschool, Li Laoshi has been the recipient of a large number of acknowledgements and certificates, including her “Child Development College Diploma”, “Outstanding Classroom Award”, “Outstanding Head Teacher Award”, “Excellence in Academic Enrichment Award”, “Dance Competition Award”, “Hand Craftsmanship Award”, “Class Award for Outstanding Performance in a Show Production”, and numerous other awards and acknowledgements.

CHEN LAOSHI: MANDARIN TEACHER

I take great joy and pride in being involved in the Early Childhood Education field, and I love every child.  I greatly enjoy spending time with children, and spending time with them allows me to relive the joy of my own childhood.  I have a cheerful and optimistic personality that I believe rubs off on the children at school as well and helps maintain their cheer and engagement.  Singing has always been one of my favorite hobbies, and as I feel the joy of singing I feel that the children also experience that joy and it helps them to make progress at school as they learn new songs and grow their skills and abilities as individuals through the art of joyful performance.

I have always fervently wanted to be a preschool teacher and began my career as a preschool teacher in China. I have been fortunate to have had many good friends around me who are also engaged in this field who have shared with me a lot of interesting things about their own happy times spent with children. This encouragement and my own interest together set me on the road to becoming a preschool teacher. I always feel that each day spent with the children is so happy and new.

I take pride in using my unremitting efforts, as well as my love, patience, sense of responsibility, and dedication to create a healthy and happy “nurturing paradise” for children.  I am also always eager and seeking out opportunities to continue to make progress in my knowledge and skills in this field.  I also enjoy sports, such as volleyball, very much and love to share my passion for sports and physical fitness with the children as well.  I firmly believe that children's physical and mental growth and development are inseparable from their healthy and strong bodies!

LeI Laoshi: Mandarin Teacher

Lei Laoshi has extensive experience as a preschool teacher in both China and America. She has a keen interest in dancing and movement, something that she gets to do a lot of as a preschool teacher. She excels in engaging the children both through her classes and one on one. She takes great pride in taking on the role of a teacher of young children and shouldering the responsibly of guiding and supporting the children’s growth and development in a highly interactive and fun way. 

Her degree of preparedness, enthusiasm, and passion for helping the kids on an individual basis always greatly impresses us all.  She feels that the role of a preschool teacher is to ensure that the children feel loved, not just at home, but also at school from the teachers and other children.  She also feels strongly that teachers should guide children to understand how they should behave in society and in life, which will offer lasting benefits for the children as they grow up.  

Zhang Laoshi: Mandarin Teacher

We are delighted to have Da Zhang Laoshi (Huifen Zhang) join Fun With Mandarin.  Da Zhang Laoshi brings with her a wealth of more than 30 years of experience from being an excellent Mandarin language teacher at an elementary school in China.  She has won many awards as an elite teacher in China and was well respected and recognized in the city where she used to live.  

She is warm, loving, patient, sweet, considerate, collaborative, and also excels in cooking nutritious and tasty food. Her excellence in cooking helps us to provide the children with healthy, balanced, and delicious homemade food. 

Ren Laoshi: Mandarin Teacher

Ren Laoshi gained a background in Art through her studies at the Huashan School of Art in Shanghai.  Owing to her performance art skills, Ren Laoshi spent four years as a member of a group responsible for welcoming top Chinese leaders and their official guests through dance and musical performance. 

Ren Laoshi had her introduction to early childhood education through experience at a preschool in downtown Shanghai, and we have been fortunate to have her as a teacher at Fun With Mandarin Preschool for more than five years where she has successfully worked to integrate teaching techniques from Shanghai and the West.  Ren Laoshi is also fully CPR and first-aid certified.  

BEN LAOSHI: SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR/CO-FOUNDER

Ben Graduated from UC Berkeley with a double major in Asian Studies and Political Science. He worked and studied in China for three years and is fluent in Chinese Mandarin.  In addition to his many years of experience with FWM, he has four years of experience as an English and Writing teacher for students of various ages here and in China and has also completed the ECE coursework and training to make him a fully-qualified Child Development Site Supervisor and teacher of Early Childhood Education.  Ben is dedicated to ensuring that the students at Fun With Mandarin receive the best possible total education experience with the right environment and the right guidance, and he undergoes significant ongoing training to explore concepts that can enhance the children's growth here.  In recent years, when not helping out at Fun With Mandarin, he has been working as a Mandarin to English translator, having been engaged in such projects as TV shows, movies, and newspaper articles.  Ben is also a certified teacher of English as a Second Language.  

Ben assists with administrative and other tasks to ensure that the other teachers can focus all their energy on the kids.  His international background and teaching experience can help the school’s efforts to engage in constant improvement and also benefit the kids a lot through his assistance with the English side of academic preparedness for kindergarten.  One of his other roles is to help look after the children’s safety when they are outdoors or on field trips.  He is also Binbin Laoshi's husband and they have two young children of their own, one boy and one girl.  Ben is also certified in CPR and first-aid.   

OUYANG LAOSHI: Mandarin Teacher

I love children very much.  As a mother of a young child myself, I am blessed all the more with love, patience, and a sense of responsibility toward children.  I greatly enjoy being a preschool teacher and greatly enjoy the field of Early Childhood Education.  Professionally and through my personal life, I have been lucky enough to accumulate a lot of experience working with children in a variety of ways.  These differing experiences have helped me to mature and grow more confident in myself as a teacher. I have always felt that the teaching profession is sacred and great.  I believe that a good teacher must not only have rich knowledge, but also noble sentiments. Therefore, when I was training in China, I paid great attention to my own comprehensive development and extensively trained my own hobbies and specialties that I could later utilize to make contributions to enriching the lives of children in my care.  Some of my hobbies include singing, dancing, and reading books.

Ever since beginning my teaching career as a preschool teacher in China, my personal educational philosophy has been rooted in love. Only through love can we educate children well.  I also always seek to fervently learn more from the other teachers around me, stay up to date by reading books, and seek to continue to develop my own learning habits and learning abilities. My view of education in general can be summed up like this: Guidance must be the mainstay and teaching itself as the support.  I believe that the source of educational power for preschool teachers comes from love and love muse be the foundation of successful early childhood education. “If there is love in life, there is everything”.  This understanding guides me and moves me forward, as I always seek to be the best teacher that I can be.