A Mid-term Review

Up till now, we have had four weeks of classes, covering the first two lessons, which is the first half of the Book One. Since this week falls in between our ski holiday last week and the Chinese New Year next week, I decided to use today's class as a mid-term review.

First I asked my daughter to read the texts of both lessons, using my copy of the textbook so she did not have the pinyin I had marked on her copy. She did the reading excellently, essentially knowing all the characters in them. She told me that she started to memorize most of the texts by now, even though that was never a requirement. It came naturally from the repetitions in the homework assignments. She still has problems in managing the tones in sentences, which is expected to be a slow process to correct.

Then we checked the characters individually, using the cards provided by the textbook. The two lessons have 60 "new" characters, a number surprised my daughter. With the characters isolated, she successfully recognized 53 of them. Of the seven, she remembered 3 or 4 on the second round as well. This is a remarkable progress in one-month's worth of classes!

We did not do too much more after that. We caught up a few things we had skipped over during our early classes and assigned some optional reading and CD-ROM homework. It was a good review session.