Hi,
Ya they have Chinese teachers during holiday programme as well.
They have a syllabus to follow during term time and during holidays, it would be thematic by books like mentioned earlier. So the same thing applies for Chinese.
Yes, they learn Phonics and Hanyu Pinyin, well at least at the East Coast centre that my boys are at. For English, they teach them sounds of consonants and vowels, starting and ending sounds, they even play word games, exploring sounds of English. E.g. for my boy's class, Friday is a backward name day, so they will call each other by their backward name... so instead of Elliot, he is Toille. And sometimes they replace all the first sound with other sounds e.g. 'B', so he is Belliot for the day...these are fun ways for the kids to understand the way English sounds work.
For Hanyu Pinyin, they have quite a lot of exercises on them too. They give them activities similar to what the primary school assessment books have, you know, give the hanyu pinyin and they choose the words etc. And they have Chinese tingxie every week and the words are difficult...much more than what Pri 1 requires. The tingxie is done in sentences e.g. Baba hai mei you hui lai, mama liu le dan gao ge ta. OR gong yuan li you qian dou wan dou mei li de hua. I know some centres have given up teaching chinese characters and chosen to focus on hanyu pinyin but the chinese teachers at Chiltern house east coast actually teach them to recognise and write Chinese characters.
Even my N2 boy has chinese character books where they learn to recognise the characters.
I supposed many parents, being typical singaporeans as we are, would still sign up for additional enrichment classes no matter how comprehensive the school's syllabus is. I remembered when my oldest boy was in N2, he couldn't understand a single Chinese word and the teacher would advise us to speak to him in Mandarin more often at home cos his classmates are all able to understand Mandarin and she had to move at their pace, so my son is often lost. So I had to sign him up for a Chinese Drama school at Young People Performing Arts Centre. With more exposure from the Arts Centre, in school and at home, my boy now can conduct conversation in Mandarin.
Actually, I think what is important when selecting schools is really the direction set by the school and the dedication of the teachers. In every school, there would be good and mediocre teachers. Teachers who love the children, and teachers who just treat teaching as work. So far, from my observation, most of the teachers in chiltern house east coast are very dedicated.
But to be fair, I have only experienced Chiltern house East Coast and GUG at United Sq...so I can only speak from my experience k?