My Plan for Chinese

These are the two main branches of my plan for Chinese this year. After these are set on track, I may add other minor elements to the mix.


1. Local Curriculum

I plan to follow the local Chinese textbook for Chinese. Make sure my boys know the words they are to know how to recognize and write. Unlike English, sadly in the case of Chinese, copying the words (or terms or sentences) alone didn't guarantee retention. I have found that flash cards used in a variety of ways, allowed me to increase their encounters with these "must-know" words, thus increasing retention.


Here is D arranging and matching word cards to make meaningful terms. These are the ones listed in the hao peng you magazine. The example sentences in there are also useful. I intend to refer to the hao peng you magazine more closely this year in this respect. There are 38 copies of this in a year, so if I complete one copy a week, I should be on schedule.

When they have mastered the "must-know" words, they would complete the topical exercise from an assessment book I bought from the local bookshop.




2.Charlotte Mason Approach

I have found that the Charlotte Mason method works for Chinese too. We read from picture books. I require my boys to give a narration of what we have read. They are still not good at expressing themselves well in Chinese. So I have to provide them with a lot of help here. Sometimes these narration turn out to be more an oral comprehension, whereby I ask them questions and they answer. Progress is slow but observable. I believe if I stick on with this, their fluency will improve with time.

I also select a sentence or two for copywork. I make them recite those sentences so that they would be familiar with the various sentence structure. I found that recitation is very effective in empowering them in their spoken language; which is my main concern now.

There are times I would go one step further by making them learn to write these sentences. (I am monitoring this closely as I feel sometimes I may be pushing them a little too hard here:-b) I would make flash cards for the words in these sentences so as to help them learn to recognize these words before I give them a dictation.