School on a Snow Day

The snow just doesn't stop falling here in Denver and it's bone-chilling cold outside. So much so that our local Chinese school canceled their classes today. Wimps.

But we are warm and cozy inside our own house, so our class went on scheduled. We continued to finish our first lesson as scheduled by our textbook, much in the same way as our first class last week.

My daughter did a fantastic job with her homework from the first week. The assignment has four installments, supposed to be done in four weekdays. Each installment has two readings, one simple character writing, two character card review/games, and a CD-ROM assignment. They are not very hard per se, but it does take time to finish them all. She did not do it strictly in the an installment per day manner but nonetheless she finished them all. It's a great job!

The homework has also helped her quite significantly. Since most of them are repetitive reading and character learning drills, she got to know her lesson text very well. When she "left" our first class, she could only barely read the lesson text. But she read it quite fluently when she "came back" today. It's very encouraging.

Besides, she said it was kind of fun doing them. It was much better than what she used to have to do for the Chinese school.

As for the lesson itself, I am still amazed on the pace we are having in keeping with the one-lesson-two-weeks schedule. I did skim over a little bit on a few things, including the lengthy reading material. I did not require her to learn to read them all. I read and explained them during our class and told her to simply read silently and try to comprehend them during her homework time. Since we are on a fast pace, I am thinking that maybe we will take a break after a couple of lessons and revisit these reading material a little bit more.

Of course, as we keep going forward, it will be interesting to see what happens when the novelty starts to wear off.