“Two tigers, two tigers, running fast, running fast ... ”When pupils from Tiger Primary School, Maidstone, England, appearing in the arena of the British Museum, the audience suddenly turned speechless. They were surprised at these little tigers’ lovely little faces and clear pronunciation of Chinese. This is a wonderful scene of the annual meeting of the UK Confucius Institute.

Little tigers on the stage

The British Chinese Conference held as scheduled on May 18th and 19th2012, which is an annual event of the British Chinese language teaching community.Apart from inviting experts and scholars to do a variety of speech, the conference was also showing some brilliant performances.

A month before the annual meeting, the Tiger School prospective pupils accompanied by parents started to learn Chinese songs. Most of the children are only four years old. At the beginning, many children were hiding in their mothers’ arms and slowly learned to sing.After short period of time, these“Little Tiger" start to be very brave and confident. They got off from their mums ‘arms and started to followed Hanban teacher’smerrysingingand dancing. At the annual meeting, our children were confidently singing “Two Tigers” and “counting ducks” in front of hundreds audiences. The parents were very excited and proud. They even burst into tears because of the brilliant performances done by their children .After the performances, these "little tigers" suddenly turned into shininglittle stars.

New Line Learning AcademyHanban teacher Yan Zhou, Di Ma, and little “tiger” star

Tiger Primary FreeSchool is the first new primary school in Maidstone, Kent, England in nearly twenty-five years. It was the Primary Section of the British SSAT New Line School. Confucius Classroom of New Line Learning Academy was officially established in 2010.The Confucius classroom here has made anincredible development under the strong support from the Confucius Institute Headquarters and the UK SSAT. As a Chinese Teaching Centerof Kent, the school offers Chinese language coursethat covers all grades from kindergarten pre-school until high school sixth-form classes. Mandarin has been officially included in the seventh and eighth grade curriculum as the required course. New Line Learning Academy is the only one school that offers Chinese as a second language schools in England. The school also set upthe weekend Chinese school from last year.In order to become the largest hub school of Mandarin teaching, Chinese and abacus will also be introduced in the new Tiger elementary school that opening in September 2012.