A New Game in Homework

There is something new in the homework in the Book 2. In the CD-ROM portion, there is a new character recognition game. The computer will present the new characters for the lesson three at a time, and ask the student to identify one by its pronunciation. It's working really well so far. My daughter likes to do it a lot. And it does help, greatly.

As we progress, the new characters are getting more and more complicated and confusing. In this week's lesson alone, we had two new characters that basically mean the same thing and make up the phrase "swing/rock" (摇摆). It's very hard for a beginner to tell these two characters apart. We also have relatively uncommon characters in 冠 and 啄.

The first time she tried the game with this week's homework, she only got 65% correct. But the second time is already much better, 85%. I am sure she will learn all the characters by the time she finishes the entire homework set. In fact, for every class we have had, she pretty much remembered all the new characters she learned in the previous week.

In fact, the textbook we are using is gradually gaining momentum. There are chatters in online forums that more and more Chinese schools in the US are starting to adopt it. Just this week, our local Chinese school announced that they will also start using it for their classes of second grade and below. (It's probably too difficult to switch textbooks for higher grades.)

Strange Lesson

We had a relatively short class yesterday. We were onto the second lesson in Book 2, which was a strange one. For one thing, it broke the one lesson for two weeks routine we had so far and was designed to be a lesson for only one week. That was okay. But, the lesson was three very simple puzzles with the answers to the puzzles in the titles. The text for the puzzle was both uninteresting and not making much sense.

For its ultra-short text, it did manage to contain the normal amount of new characters, however.

I was very disappointed with the lesson selection of this one. It was an odd exception to the generally good texts we had in this book. Fortunately, the reading material for this class was decent. Even my daughter wished that they had reversed the selections.

Goal!!!!!!

My daughter scored the winning goal in her soccer match yesterday. It was the first win for our team so far, three games into the season. She is happy and excited. I am more proud than ever, both as Dad and as coach.

Of course this has nothing to do with Chinese schooling. Except that we did have our usual class in the afternoon and then mowed the lawn together. What a perfect Sunday!

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.

Learning Chinese and Piano

When my daughter complains about her extra-curriculum work load, which she does occasionally but thankfully not too often, piano and Chinese are always the two main targets. Why can't they be as fun as the other activities, like soccer and swimming?

One reason I had been pondering about is that it really may be in the teaching philosophy. In youth sports, kids gather for practice sessions, which becomes more and more frequent as their skill levels increase. But they are never required to do "homework" on their own. The few kids who really love a certain sport would gladly do extras on their own, but not at the request of their coaches.

That is certainly not the case as in piano, where a teacher can require the kids to practice every day, on their own. Is that the only way to learn the skill?

I am experimenting in cutting back homework in our Chinese learning.

Incidentally, a new study published in New York Times today is getting some attention. It claims that learning piano early could help people master a tonal language like Chinese, and even perhaps vice versa:

Mandarin speakers have been shown to have a more complex encoding of pitch patterns in their brains than English speakers do. This is presumably because in Mandarin and other Asian languages, pitch plays a central role. A single-syllable word can have several meanings depending on how it is intoned.

For this study, the researchers looked at 20 non-Chinese speaking volunteers, half with no musical background and half who had studied an instrument for at least six years.

As they were shown a movie, the volunteers also heard an audiotape of the Mandarin word “mi” in three of its meanings: squint, bewilder and rice. The researchers recorded activity in their brain stems to see how well they were processing the sounds.

Those with a music background showed much more brain activity in response to the Chinese sounds.

The lead author of the study, Patrick C. M. Wong, said it might work both ways. It appears that native speakers of tonal languages may do better at learning instruments, Dr. Wong said.

Sick Day

My daughter is under the weather today so we skip the week. It's nice to be able to do that thanks to the flexibility of home schooling.