Pangu: the Chinese Legend/Myth

One of the biggest differences or improvements in our Grade 3 textbook in comparison of the Grade 2 one is that it consists a variety of legends, myths, fables, and other stories. Most of them are Chinese and some of them were translated from foreign sources.

The third lesson of the textbook has two reading materials, one is a simplified version of the legend of Pangu (盘古开天地) and another is a fable of drawing snakes with feet (画蛇添足). My daughter read the reading the first one as part of her homework last night. Even though she could read the text fairly well by herself, she needed substantial help to understand the story. But she enjoyed the story a great deal. Because of the story itself, she probably spent quite a bit more time on it than she usually spent in reading material assignments.

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.

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.