The Stanford Textbook is Here!

The textbook from Stanford Chinese School arrived last night. It has been merely a week since I actually dropped a check in the mail for them, so that is pretty quick. I ordered the second-grade textbook (Books 4, 5, and 6 according to their web site). It actually comes in as a single book, plus three student exercise booklets (two to alternate for odd/even weeks, another one for summer break) and a CD-ROM.

The books are professionally produced, with paper, printing, and binding all in very high quality. Leafing through the pages quickly, I found it to be even more impressive than the samples on the web showed. Here are some quick notes.

What I liked:

1. The emphasize on reading is apparent. The lesson text and reading materials are much longer and with much more substance. They are mostly stories of various interest.
2. Although they tend to be long, there are many, many repetitions (by design) of the same or similar wordings, phrases, and sentence structures throughout the stories. It should make the reading easier as the student progresses.
3. The illustration of grammar usages, the isolation of certain words, phrases, and sentence structures are excellent. (Somehow it reminds me the books I used to crank when I was preparing to take the TOEFL and GRE exams.)
4. Although there seems to be too much homework (four times a week), the assignment is mostly on reading. It does not seem to be too hard or time-consuming.
5. As part of exercising in recognizing characters, most of the homework involves playing a "scramble"-like game: reconstructing the text with a set of loose character cards. The CD-ROM contains a similar exercise. This could be a very fun way for the students to learn characters.
   

What I didn't like:

1. The lessons and readings are way too dominated by fables and ancient stories. While interesting, it lacks variety for an entire year's material.
   
2. It lacks dialogs and conversations that pertain to daily life situations.
3. I would have preferred to have three separate books instead of a single, thick one, as the textbook.
4. There is no teacher's guide. Not even a recommended schedule. From the homework booklets one could deduce that it is supposed to take two weeks for one lesson.
5. For the first lesson (that I have looked at), the homework booklets imply the lesson is taught in two parts, but the CD-ROM homework covers the entire lesson even in the first exercise.
   
6. Something odd: the entire textbook (and homework) does not teach or use Pinyin, as promised. But the homework for summer break contains many Pinyin exercises. An oversight?

Overall, I liked it, a lot. More importantly though, my daughter liked it too. When I showed her the book and how it is designed, she got really, really excited: "I can't wait to get this started!" Well, for that, we shall see. :)