It’s no secret that students learn more effectively when they’re up and moving around. Some subjects are tough to teach that way. It didn’t stop the educators at International Leadership of Texas from taking gym class and combining it with one of the toughest subjects to learn. Coach Li Yue gets hard at work in the school gym, making sure her students get a good workout and not just of their bodies. This gym class is in Mandarin. “We are practicing the dialects through the movements. So that means the kids, they can speak Chinese and practice the movements also,” said Yue. Part PE teacher, part language teacher.She’s helping the students grasp the basics of Kung Fu, all while throwing up vocabulary words from Mandarin class. The students have conversations while navigating the nunchucks. “It’s just hard. It just takes a lot of practice,” said Tania Araejo. “I feel like I’ve been getting better a lot.” “Chinese is a big language. It has over 5,000 characters. We don’t memorize all of them. We memorize the stuff that has to do with Kung Fu, and whenever you see characters a thousand times, you get used to it,” added Falak Alkhaldi, another student. The class is taught entirely in Mandarin, but it was pretty clear that the students have mastered both the language and the martial art. This is all part of the curriculum at the International Leadership of Texas charter school in Garland. They’re helping students grow to be international citizens of the world. Many of their students join the USmilitary knowing and understanding different languages and cultures. ...read more read less