It's Two Days before Our Classes

Finally, our home schooling will officially start this Sunday. It will be exciting, or interesting, or both. Before we start, I talked with my daughter on a few issues, mostly our goals and ground rules.

Goals

I would like to set a few goals that we can check our progress against in a later time. These will be goals for both of us. It is not a trivial task since I have no reference to base upon and language skills are usually hard to measure. To start it off, I decided just to have a near-term, namely six-month goals:

1. Learning Characters: She should be able to recognize at least 200 characters out of the most-frequently-used 500.
2. Pronunciation: She should have a marked, recognizable improvement in her pronunciations.
3. Talking: She should start to speak Chinese in some simply, daily conversations. She may be able to speak comprehensible Chinese mixed with English words where her Chinese vocabulary is lacking.

The first goal is the most straightforward and also quantitatively measurable. Our current baseline is that she recognizes 136. This will be a reasonable improvement in the time period. Of course she would also have learned characters that are not on the list also. The other two goals are what we try to achieve. They are not as easy to measure, but I think we will be able to give our fair evaluations too.

Start talking in Chinese may be the hardest of them all, as it involves both language skills and mental confidence, as well as willingness.

What are not in the goals are other basic language skills such as writing of characters, constructing sentences, and phrases. These will of course remain the essential parts of our lessons and exercises. But I decided to leave them out of goals for now so we have a better focus.

Rules

We agreed on two basic rules:

1. We will have a two-hour class session (with breaks) every week, mostly on Sundays. During the class period, all her regular school rules apply. She should behave just as she does in her school classes.
2. We will have weekly homework assignments and she is expected to finish them before the next class. She probably will be doing her homework with her Mom so that she has a different learning environment than our classes.

Schedule

I had thought of making a calendar for our school year or semester or quarter. But I am still not sure what our weekly pace should be. We will be mainly using the Standford textbook, which covers a lesson every two weeks. I thought two weeks may not be enough from where we are starting. But I am not sure whether to spend three or four weeks in one lesson.

So, we don't have a school calendar yet. We will reevaluate that after we go through a couple of lessons and see how we are doing by that point. The biggest advantage of home-schooling is the flexibility, right?