Resuming Classes

When we took a mini break for our Chinese school in late July, my daughter was busy with her fourth-grade school and swimming. Her summer swimming season ended in early August. That was when we had actually resumed the Chinese school also.

During the last few weeks, however, she has had plenty of homework from school, which took up quite a bit of her evening time at home. We were forced to adapt a much slower pace with the Chinese schooling, in which we cover a weekly lesson in two weeks instead of one. This allows her more time to finish the Chinese homework before we start a new lesson. We figure that it is better to do this way instead of trying to maintain a schedule and rush the lessons.

She is now in the middle of three-week "off-track" where she has no school and therefore no school homework. But on the other hand, her Fall soccer season has just got started. We will see if we can get back to the regular schedule.

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.

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.

After Sleepover

We had a bit short class this past Sunday. My daughter had her best friend coming over for a sleep over Saturday night, which of course left her pretty tired. But we went through the lesson okay. But we had to cut it short when we reached the reading material. She promised to study the reading materials with her Mom while doing the homework.

The reading materials at the end of each lesson might not be supposed to be part of the class anyway. But to assist her learning, I had always included them. Usually I read and explain them for her and then have her read after me for once. This makes it easier for her to do the homework, which requires her to read them for a grade from the parents (Mom). We will see how she does this week without the class.

My daughter's best friend used to be her classmate in the local Chinese school. They were in 2nd grade in the school and should be in 3rd grade in the Fall. But since the school is going to switch to the textbook we are using for 2nd grade and below only, her parents had decided to have her repeat the 2nd grade next year. We heard that she is not alone. There are other kids who will do the same.

Even though her best friend has better abilities in Chinese language and can understand the lecture (in Chinese), she still did not like the school at all. Just like my daughter, the only thing they liked about the school were the break time!

Since we are not taking summer break this year, we will be using the 3rd grade book by Fall. This means, of course, my daughter will be one-year ahead of some of her peers. How exciting!

No Class This Weekend

This is a busy weekend for us. My daughter's spring soccer season came to an end. we had the season finale game in the morning and a team party in the afternoon.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. We will go to see the musical, Pirates of Penzance. My daughter is doing the same musical in her school and very excited about it. It's nice to get to see a professional production of the same show while she is doing her school production.

It's always a great advantage of home schooling that we can take a weekend off when we need to. On the other hand, we have also decided to not having any long summer breaks like the local schools do. We will continue on with our classes throughout summer as usual, taking occasional breaks when we need to.

With the pace we are doing, we could catch up with her grade level within another year. That is, by the time she starts 5th grade in her regular school, next year in the Fall, we could be starting the 5th grade Chinese textbook as well. This prospect is already having my daughter excited. Hopefully it will keep her motivated as a nice goal to achieve.