A Mini Summer Break

We had thought that we could just continue on through the summer with our classes, but the dog days are not that easy to handle. With the hot weather and my daughter's swimming meet and other activities, she is pretty worn out on Sundays. The last couple of classes we had were not as smooth as we had hoped. With a camping trip coming up next weekend, we decided to take a mini-break for a couple of weeks and then resume by the end of the month.

Taking a break is a fairly significant schedule relief for my daughter. It's not just that she doesn't have to have a class on Sunday. It's also that she doesn't have to worry about Chinese home work for a couple of weeks. With her new school year (4th grade!) already started (school homework!) and her swimming going full-steam, it is a nice break indeed.

New Goals

We started working on the third, and last book in the 2nd grade textbook today. The book follows the existing scheme without much significant change. But we are adding a couple more requirements:

1. For each lesson, there are two sets of characters that the students are supposed to memorize and be able to write during a dictation quiz in the class. One set is from the lesson at hand, and another set is a list of commonly-used characters, which tends to be easier. This requirement had been there since Book Two. But back then, I only required my daughter to learn only the second set. She only had to write the first set during homework but not having to memorize them. She did an excellent job in handing the one set of characters and did not make any mistakes in quizzes. So, now, both sets of characters will be required.
2. For the homework that asks students to write down sentences using phrases, we now require the sentence to be at least 8 characters long. This is to make sure that she is not making sentences that are too simple. Originally I had wanted a 10-character minimum, but she protested and bargained it down to 8.
   
3. We will start having instructions in Chinese more and more. The goal is that she will be able to understand most Chinese instructions. But we will do it such that she will be able to understand everything. Whenever she has difficulty, English will be used to explain.

It is also time to set new goals for this half of a year. We did a pretty good job with our goals for the first half. So, here are three goals we will try to achieve by the end of the year:

1. Learning Characters: She should be able to recognize at least 300 characters out of the most-frequently-used 500.
2. Sentences: She will be able to make compound sentences in Chinese in regularity.
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 similar to that of our previous goals, with the target number raised from 200 to 300. Last half a year, she managed to achieve the goal by learning 77 characters (to reach 202). This time she will have to learn 98 more for the new goal.

The second goal is tied to the sentence-making homework exercises. She should be able to get out of simple-sentence mode and make sentences with more structure and clauses.

The third goal is actually the exact same goal we had last time, which we did not achieve. Hopefully, we will be able to do a better job this time around.