Our First Class!

We officially opened our home school this morning at 10:30. There was no fanfare we just went right into our first lesson.

Our textbook is the Stanford Chinese school one reviewed earlier. I had worried about whether there was too much material to cover in the two weeks per lesson schedule. But to my pleasant surprise, we covered half of the lesson without rushing in our two-hour class session! Looks like we will be able to follow the schedule forward, which would be a fairly fast pace.

The first lesson's main text is a simplified monkeys-fetching-moon-out-of-water story, apparently originated from Tibet. The text is quite short. Before the class, I had marked my daughter's copy with Pinyin on some of the characters, as I knew she would have difficulty without them. We started with my reading and then explaining the story. Then She read after me line by line, with frequent repeats to correct some pronunciations. We did this three or four times and then took a five-minute break.

After the first break, we reviewed new characters with the flashcards supplied by the textbook. Then we went over some new phrases. I had her doing the writing exercises in the book and then went over the "grammar points". A couple of the grammar points were a little hard to explain clearly. She also got tired and frustrated when I asked her to read after me on the sample sentences. So we took another break.

By now it was about half an hour before our finish time. I read a version of the tadpole-looking-for-mommy story which was included as this week's reading material. This story is actually more than five times in length than the lesson text. But it is made up with same structures with a lot of repetition. My daughter was actually able to comprehend much of the story just from my reading it. (In comparison, she did not get much from listening to the monkeys story for the first time.)

After going through the reading material, we returned to the main text, and did one more "follow-me" reading. Then I explained the homework structure from the textbook, which includes a CD-ROM. With that, we concluded our first lesson. We were about five minutes early.

It was a good class. Although she did get frustrated in the middle of it, she said later she had a good time too. She felt that this was a lot better than going to Chinese school and also she learned more this way. It made a huge difference now that she understood everything since almost all of my instructions were in English.

I also realized that home-schooling is a lot more intensive than regular school. Since she is the only student present, she is the target of attention and focus all the time. In the future, I may need to find ways to "leave her alone" a little bit more and/or having more frequent breaks.