A More Flexible Schedule

Finding enough time to get her Chinese homework done during school week has always been a problem for my daughter. She has a very busy schedule which does not leave a whole lot of available time in evenings.

The textbook we are using has a strong emphasize in homework assignments. Even though we have eliminated some homework that appears to be not so helpful, the weekly assignment may require more than 5 hours in total to finish. She simply does not have that much time during the week, and I did not want her to cram everything during one weekend day either.

So, now we are trying a more flexible schedule. After last week's lesson, she still had some homework left uncompleted. We continued on with today's lesson, which is really the second half of one lesson in the book. She will spend this week doing today's homework assignment. Then, we may take a break next week in lessons so she could catch up with all that were left in homework.

Since most of the lessons in the textbook takes two weeks to complete, it is probably natural for us to use three weeks in this fashion. It will slow down our pace, but it is better than not completing the homework, some of which are actually very helpful exercises. Besides, going back to finish earlier homework assignments may be a good review session by itself!

A Little Riddle

My daughter is still fond at translating Chinese into English. It's not part of our homework assignment but she is doing it on her own. Here is a little riddle she just translated:

Wash hands, wash face, and take a bath,
Born to love blowing bubbles,
For other people, the more they wash, the cleaner they get,
For me though, the more I wash, the skinnier I get.

The original in Chinese:

洗手，洗脸，又洗澡，
生来就爱吹泡泡，
人家越洗越干净，
它呀，越洗越瘦小。

Notice that she switched the third person singular (它) into the first person singular in her translation. :)

Taking Notes

New year, new book. We started our first class of the year today, at the Lesson One of the 2nd Book of the third grade.

On her own initiative, my daughter brought a little notebook with me. She said she would like to start taking notes during the classes. As we went through the list of new characters for this lesson, she wrote each of them down in her note book, the pinyin, the character itself, and its meaning in English.

It's a nice way to break the dullness of going through new characters. It also reinforces her learning of them, as she was paying close attention when she had to write them down. As such, later in the class, we spent less time going through the character cards.