Fourth Grade!

It was the last day of summer yesterday and we started our new "school year" with the fourth grade book. In the real school, my daughter had already become a fifth grader during summer.

The fourth-grade of our textbook looks just like the third-grade one. The lesson text seems to be a tiny bit longer, but not harder. There is one more reading material in the homework, making it four in total. One of them continued to be a review of a previous lesson text. But there is also a long one that was double the usual length. In addition, there is a new segment of making up phrases from characters.

We have to expect that the homework is going to take longer to finish. With her busy schedule, we are looking at having classes every other Sunday instead of every week.

Third Grade Done

It's been a while. But we finished the third-grade book this past weekend. We will take a few weeks off and then start the fourth-grade in mid-September.

Starting on Book 3, Grade 3

Today we started on the 3rd and final book of the Grade 3 textbook. The text is a condescending lecture of the importance of not wasting time, which is not particularly interesting. With this new book, the load for homework is increased a little bit. There is one additional reading material per week. But the nice thing about it is that the additional reading material is actually a text that was in the Grade 2, so it's a nice review.

For hand-writing exercises, instead of writing and dictating short phrases, the homework now requires writing whole sentences, with one of the sentences to be dictated in class.

Book Two of the Third Grade is Done

It took quite a bit longer than I had expected, but we finally finished the Book Two of the 3rd grade today with a review class. My daughter had exciting soccer games in both yesterday and today, so she is tired by the time we had our class in the evening. We did not do a whole lot in our review.

It's Been a Great Year

Today we had a very brief review session to close out the first book of the third grade. This also concludes our first (calendar) year of Chinese school at home. It's been a great year. We finished the 2nd grade book and a third of the 3rd grade. My daughter has been making great strides in learning characters and reading comprehensions.

Happy Holidays!

Pinyin is done

The first four lessons of the 3rd grade book are about teaching pinyin skills. We went through them quite quickly since my daughter had learned pinyin a couple of years ago. Today, we started with the fifth lesson, a "normal" one after all the pinyin was taken care of.

It's quite curious that the lessons in this first book of the 3rd grade book seems to be easier than those in the 2nd grade book. For this lesson, we have a nice story of a General's son figuring out how to weigh an elephant (曹冲称象), a famous historical tale which is more likely a legend than a factual. The story is pretty much the entire lesson. We don't have any grammar or other language teaching.

During the teaching of the 2nd grade book, we had settled into a routine in which I would have her read after me the text a couple of times before her reading on her own. She had complained it as tedious and boring. Today I tried something slightly different. I had her trying to read the text all by herself without teaching her first. She did pretty well for the most part, aided by the pinyin I had put on the new characters. After that, we went through the new characters and explained the meaning of the text.

The lesson was done in less than an hour, which made my daughter pretty happy.

3rd Grade!

This past Sunday we started our first lesson of the 3rd grade book. Due to the unique design of this textbook series, the start of the 3rd grade is when they finally teach pinyin. The book plans to have four lessons in four weeks to cover the entire pinyin content, while also teaching some new characters. This suits us really well.

My daughter has learned pinyin several years ago when she was still attending our local Chinese school. Although her pronunciation still has much room to improve, she is remarkably well in knowing the pinyin system itself. So we really don't need to spend much time on it other than reviewing and having fun with some of the tongue-twisters designed to improve pronunciations.

This also looks to be four easy weeks, not only in the lessons but also in the homework load. As pinyin being the current focus, the homework is temporarily without character-dictation and sentence-making tasks, two of the more difficult ones for my daughter.

Things should be back to "normal" after the initial four weeks. :)

Grade Promotion, Finally!

It took quite a bit longer than we originally thought, but we finally finished the last lesson and review for the Book 3 or the 2nd grade. Next week, we will start our 3rd grade classes!

My daughter did pretty well in our last review class, during which we went through all the character cards and lesson texts of the Book 3. She was able to read all the lessons without the help of Pinyin and only had a little bit of hiccups when she was unsure of pronunciation of certain characters. Of the 136 new characters in this book, she was able to recognize over 100 of them, without any help of context.

In the meantime, the original excitement when we started with this 2nd grade textbook is wearing off dramatically. We have since settled into a routine of how the class progresses and my daughter is getting tired and sick of it.

For the lesson text, I usually start by reading the text myself for her. Then she reads after me sentence-by-sentence for a couple of times, which gives me opportunities to correct or refine some of the pronunciation problems. We will then finish by hearing her reading it all by herself for once. She felt that this process is a bit too long and tedious. We probably need to change the routine as we start our 3rd grade to keep her fresh and more interested.

The other big complain she has is when we go through the grammar rules in the book. When I explain the lesson, I usually already touch on most of the grammar points. The systematic illustration of the grammar after the lesson text seems to be boring for her. We usually go by them quickly and I am not sure how much attention she was paying for them anyway.

Curiously, the 3rd grade textbook seems to have little to nothing in the grammar teaching. The textbook is made up almost entirely with the lesson text and reading materials alone. It seems that it is designed to emphasize reading and reading. My daughter was happy when she saw that. I guess we will just have to teach grammar based on what we are reading.

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.

6-Month Goal Check

We took last weekend off to go rafting and hiking. Today, we had a review class where my daughter read the lessons we have learned in Book 2. She did fairly well.

It's mid-June and almost 6 months since we started our home school. So, it's a perfect time to revisit the goals we set back in January. Back then, we thought that we would have achieved three goals in six months:

1. Learning Characters: She should be able to recognize at least 200 characters out of the most-frequently-used 500.
2. Pronunciation: She should have a marked, recognizable improvement in her pronunciations.
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.

So, I printed out the 500 character list again and asked my daughter to go over them and identify the ones she could now recognize. Once again, it's a tedious and difficult task. It's also hard to recognize some of the characters without their usual contexts. But with a couple of breaks, she managed to finish the list before completely losing patience. After tallying the check marks, we came up to............

202! Just two characters above our preset goal! So, check that one up!!

As she was working through the list, I could easily see that she had missed a few characters she had recently learned, partly due to the missing context and partly due to her mood. Anyhow, I also felt that she had learned quite a few more characters that were not in the 500 most-frequently-used list at all. But we were happy that we achieved the goal, even just so barely.

The second goal was not as easy to measure. But through her reading of the lessons and reading materials in the book, I felt that her pronunciation had indeed improved a great deal. She is much more aware of the tones in Chinese sentences and is developing a nice tempo in her reading. Obviously, however, we still got a lot of work to do in this area.

Unfortunately, we had to chalk up the #3 goal as a miss. With the emphasize in character recognition and reading for the past half year, we did not do much in the daily conversation area. As a result, she is still not speaking Chinese at all, other than a few phrases here and there. It's something we will have to work on going forward.

Book Two is Completed

We did not even take a break during the Memorial holiday last weekend. With these two weeks, we finished the last lesson in the Book Two. So now we are 2/3 of way to finish the 2nd grade book. Today, I sent in another check to the Stanford Chinese School for a copy of their 3rd grade book. We need to get prepared.

On With Book Two

Yesterday was the Easter Sunday and it was snowing, so it was perfect for us to keep on with our Chinese school at home!

We moved on to the Book 2 of our second-grade textbook. Our first lesson is about a seed sprouting in the Spring. Perfect for our season, despite of the snow. For some reason, it felt that the lesson text actually got a little easier. Maybe the emphasize was shifted a little bit more to the reading materials.

The homework assignment now asks the students to read the reading material to their parents for a grade. We have never done it before. So far I only required my daughter to read them on her own, without any checking. We will see how this goes.

The homework also includes a set of known characters for the students to study so that they could write them from memory in a dictation quiz when they come back to class. The first set was quite trivial, just numbers. It could get harder as we go along.

We are continuing with our homework reduction scheme. We are ditching the "white card" scramble game entirely and only require her to do the reading assignments twice instead of four times.

We Have Completed Book One

We had a review session yesterday, and with that, we completed the Book One of our second-grade textbook. That is, we are one-third done for the year, as there are three books for a grade.

During the review session, I had my daughter reading the text of all four lessons, without the help of Pinyin. I had expected some hiccups in the first couple of lessons, which were learned two months ago. But she surprised and impressed me by reading all lessons quite smoothly. There were only a handful of characters she had difficulty with. She had also improved in managing the tones in sentences.

For the four lessons in Book One, there are 118 "new" characters to learn. It was quite a pile to put all these character cards together and took a while to go through them one by one. Without context, it was a little more difficult to recognize some of these characters. But she was able to do so for all by 29 of them!

For this week's homework, I asked her to record her own readings of the four lessons into a digital voice recorder. Maybe we could save them as archives as we progress.

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.

Our Baseline: 136 Out of 500

So, we have a list of 500 most-frequently-used Chinese characters, it's time to do another test. I copied the characters directly off this page, and pasted them into Excel. Then I stripped off the Pinyin and rearranged into five columns, each for 100 characters. This prints out into three pages.

Last time when I did a character recognizing test with my daughter, I asked her to mark the characters with "+", "check", and "-", for words she definitely knew, she thought she knew but couldn't tell, and not knowing at all. That method was not entirely effective and she got tired and it went on. So this time we tried something simpler: she just checks off any characters she knew.

Here is the result:

1. From 1-100: known 46
2. 101-200: 27
3. 201-300: 15
4. 301-400: 19
5. 401-500: 29

The total is 136 out of the 500.

As noted in the previous post, this kind of tests has several weaknesses, mostly because it asks her to recognize characters without pronunciation help or context. But nonetheless, I think this is as good a baseline measurement as we could get, as far as learning characters go. She certainly knows some more characters that are not in this list, but probably not much. (In that other test, she recognized 100 characters out of about 300, which was a more limited sample.)

We will come back to this later on as one measure of our progresses.

Word Count, the English Style

Just as I have been obsessing with the usage frequency of Chinese characters, this comes along from the Language Log.

But we are getting off the topic here.