Better Chinese's Discovering Chinese Curriculum Review

This fall, we started more formal Chinese lessons than our previous informal lessons that introduced them to many common words. It was a bit haphazard, since I had no rhyme or reason to what words and concepts I taught (unless it related to a specific unit in science that we were studying), and I had no direction of where to go.

We decided to give Better Chinese's Discovering Chinese a try.  This is their introductory Middle-school/High School curriculum.  They now have a newer edition (Discovering Chinese Pro) than the one we bought, with more online resources and expanded content, but even without all that, I feel like it is a pretty effective curriculum. I think it helped that my kids were already familiar with many of the first few lessons' words, so it wasn't so overwhelming to learn all those words at once, but even so, I think it's a good pace. There's maybe 8-10 new words per lesson, and there's a workbook that goes along with it that allows the kids to practice the words in a variety of ways-straight copying, fill-in-the-blanks, rearranging sentences, answering questions, identifying radicals. I like the focus on reading and writing (whereas in our informal lessons before, I often taught words without teaching the characters, because I felt they were too complex to learn, but in this curriculum, complex characters are introduced, but we are focusing on just reading them, not writing them). There are also cut-out flashcards at the end of the book for the new vocabulary, which we have used for games like bingo, flashcard race to read it fastest, and unscramble the sentences.

Some features I liked when we decided to go with this curriculum:

• The option to purchase a simplified vs traditional version of the book
• The use of pinyin
• The little cultural notes included in each lesson
• The comic book format for teaching the new lesson

Some of the other resources I looked at often seemed to only have pinyin with Simplified characters or zhuyin with Traditional characters, and since we had already started with pinyin, and having grown up with Traditional characters, I really wanted that combination of pinyin and Traditional characters.

We go at about 1 lesson per week, sometimes using 1.5 weeks to finish up a lesson, if the words are harder to remember. As the lessons progress though, I'm finding we need longer in order to review previous weeks' words as well.

The new online app looks really good, but I'm not sure if we will sign up for it. We are doing ok with just the textbook/workbook, but I think it's great that this curriculum offers a web interface. The overall curriculum is classroom-oriented, but works really well for homeschooling as well.

Learning Chinese as a Visual vs Auditory Learner

I've known Monkey is a visual learner for a while, and I've been slowly introducing Chinese to the kids for a while...but it wasn't until recently that my dad made an observation that prompted me to change the direction of how I teach my kids Chinese.  What my dad said was, "Oh, then he must be pretty good at remembering Chinese characters!" Well, up until that point, I hadn't even bothered to teach them any of the written characters, because I just figured I'd speak and they'd pick up on words, the same way babies learn language-they don't learn to read until they know how to speak and make connections from the written word to a language they already can understand, and I'd eventually move on to reading/writing after they could converse.

Anyhow, I went ahead and started adding Chinese writing about once a week and reviewing it each week, and what I found is that Monkey really does remember how to "read" the words, however, he can't remember how to say those words in Chinese! So if he "reads" the Chinese, he tells me what it means in English, not what it says in Chinese.  Bunny, on the other hand, who is more of an auditory learner, can remember how to say a lot of phrases and words we've worked on, but can't remember how to recognize or write the words! So, I guess the challenge ahead is to find a way to keep going with the skills that each are good at, but at the same time, not to lose the other child who isn't grasping it as easily.

Many years ago, I had 2 cousins who visited Taiwan together. One could speak the Chinese fairly well, but couldn't read, and the other could read(in the same way Monkey can-he could read and know the English equivalent), but couldn't speak. I thought it was so strange, yet so perfect, that they could travel together and get around with each having half the knowledge of the language! Anyway, I suppose I could just teach each child the skill they are most comfortable with, but I would really like them to be able to both speak and read.

Weekly Wrapup: Human Anatomy Skeletal System

Taking a break from US History, we've started in on our Human Anatomy unit. We are using Apologia's Exploring Creation with Human Anatomy and so far, I love it! It gives a lot of in-depth detail, with lots of hands on ideas. We are also reading from Sassafras Adventures: Anatomy, because the kids like the adventure story of the Sassafras twins.  The teaching aspect though, is really too high level and rushed, so we use it as an overview/introduction to the system we are studying.  They cover each of the systems in the human body in 2 chapters, with one of the characters usually being an 'expert' that shares information about the various body parts, but I feel like the way it's done, it's all blurted out in a really dense paragraph of scientific detail, thrown in the midst of the adventure story. It's not slowly interspersed, and I think when it's too condensed the kids don't really absorb any of it. So for scheduling purposes, we are going in the order of the Sassafras book chapters so that we can read the story in the correct order, and then skipping around in the Apologia book to use the chapter which corresponds with the system being studied. We are planning about 2 weeks per system.

We started off with the skeletal system, covering joints, cartilage,  bone structure, formation of new bones, names of various bones of the body. Some of the hands-on projects we did were:

•  a beaded spine craft on a pipe cleaner with sequins in between, different colors represent the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar vertabrae 

•  looking at a shin bone from a piece of meat to see the compact bone vs the soft inside
•  looking at the bones of a rotisserie chicken
•  looked at paper skeleton that we just happened to have access to because my husband made on back in high school

• soaking a chicken bone in vinegar to see what happens when the calcium is removed by reacting with the vinegar (the bone becomes soft)

Many of the ideas I'm using for our Anatomy plans came from a Konos user who has posted her lessons on her Free Unit-Study webpage. This is a great resource that we're going to use throughout our unit. 

 

We also tied in our Chinese lessons, learning the words for various body parts, as well as the word for bone.  Unfortunately, my Chinese vocabulary doesn't extend to words like "osteoblasts" or "cartilage" or "mandible"! 

While we are taking a break from History, I am still reading aloud from George Washington's World, which gives us a brief look at what was going on in the world during various parts of George Washington's lifetime. We are not studying world history in depth right now, but this will give a bit of backdrop to the events of American History that we had recently studied, so later on, when we do world history they will have some familiarity with it.

This post is linked up with Weird, Unsocialized Weekly-Wrapup.

Informal Chinese Lessons

We haven't plunged into really teaching Chinese as a formal school subject. With this past year being our first year of homeschooling, I didn't want to overwhelm myself (and I certainly WAS overwhelmed!) with yet another subject to teach during the day.

But I DID want my children to learn some Chinese. Even the local public elementary schools teach Mandarin, I didn't want my half-Chinese kids to end up behind the public school kids' Chinese!

So we've been working on about 15 minutes per day of Chinese (usually done during afternoon snack), rotating among a variety of learning activities including:

• Kids Learn Mandarin by Fingerprint -  iPad game app- colors, animals, professions, food, etc. (We also use other apps listed in my spreadsheet, but we like Kids Learn Mandarin the best).
• Mandarin Language Lessons by Yangyang Cheng - Grammar, conversation
• Tone Practice 
• YouTube videos of stories narrated in Chinese 
• General conversation in everyday life- I'll ask a question in Chinese like "Do you want to eat a banana or an apple?" and they answer in Chinese, or when we're about to go out, I'll state in Chinese, "We are going to xyz's house". And we just practice a variety of phrases that they've learned. 

Since my husband doesn't speak Chinese, the kids don't get the benefit of hearing Chinese in the background and absorbing it, the way I did growing up. I always have grand intentions of just speaking to them throughout the day in Chinese so they hear it and get used to the sound and pick up some meaning through context, but, admittedly, I'm pretty forgetful about this!

After the realization that Monkey is a visual learner and would probably easily memorize the pictoral Chinese characters,  I'm going to start teaching him how to recognize and write some words, using some workbooks we have at home that show some simple words and some of the iPad apps  that focus on writing. 

The disadvantage of these informal lessons is that there is no tracking of what we have accomplished. At this point, I guess it's OK, we are not formally studying it, but just trying to give them a feel for the language. 

As a note to myself though, for future reference, here's an attempt to list what we have covered:

• Hello, Goodbye, Thank You, Excuse Me
• What's your name?
• Verbs - be, go, carry, want, have, come, sleep, sit, eat, take, like, know
• Nouns - colors, relatives, animals, fruit, kitchenware items, professions
• Pronouns
• Possessive
• Other - today, tomorrow, or 
• Question words - What, How many, Who, Where
• Time

Weekly Wrap-up: Aerodynamics and Chinese New Year

We took a break from Ancient History and did a unit on aerodynamics this week. I don't have a science curriculum we are following, I'm just going with topics that Monkey has expressed an interest in. So for any topic, I take out books from the library, look up videos on line, and do web searches for other ideas homeschoolers used for that topics, sometimes using lapbooks, or experiments, etc. I don't know how people homeschooled before the internet age!

Unfortunately, aerodynamics wasn't such a common homeschool topic for elementary-aged kids... There was a lot about airplanes and flight, so I used some of that, but Monkey wasn't so much into types of airplanes or the history of flight, he was mostly interested in the science of it, but a lot of the stuff I found on aerodynamics was too advanced, so I had to piece together an assortment of ideas. We ended up using a  Bill Nye video on Flight, some books from the library (including Up, Up, and Away: The Science of Flight, Aerospace Engineering and the Principles of Flight) and did some demos/experiments on Bernoulli's principle.

Of course, making paper airplanes and experimenting with how they flew based on wing shape/size was part of our hands-on learning, and boy, did they have fun with this! They got quite a collection of paper airplanes(this is less than half of what they made):

Because Chinese New Year was this past week, we also decided to add that to our studies. This was very last minute but I pulled together this Chinese New Year unit study. I'll have to plan more in advance next year. These are the decorations they made for the house, as I reviewed the names of the animals in Chinese and introduced them to the written characters (so far, most of our Chinese lessons have only covered speaking/listening, not writing/reading). They drew pictures of animals, but not using the 'how to draw' link from what I planned for the unit study:

We also made homemade dumplings, one of the traditional foods eaten for the New Year celebration, on New Year's Eve:

Videos in Chinese for kids

Something else I've been using is stories told in Chinese for kids on YouTube.

Fun to read Chinese - Many picture books, read aloud in Chinese, with Chinese characters and sometimes English words on screen. The videos are short, 1-2 minutes. The voice is very 'high-pitched', little-kid-ish, but I guess that fits with the content of the books.

Miss Panda's Reading Playground - Miss Panda reads popular English kids' books in Chinese (e.g. "The Hungry Caterpillar","Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See?" There's only 6 at this point, I hope maybe there will be more someday!

Short Chinese Stories for Kids by MandarinChinese Lessons- These are a series of 100+ short cartoons for kids, narrated in Chinese, with Chinese subtitles (no pin-yin though). The videos are less than 2 minutes long each, but it's hard to know what's going on in the story sometimes.

Kids Chinese Songs by MandarinChinese Lessons - These are cartoon videos of Chinese songs/rhymes with Chinese subtitles, including pin-yin. Each one is less than 2 minutes long.


These are geared for pretty young kids (probably preschool to younger elementary), but I think even my 10 year old and 8 year old are OK with this as an introduction to hearing Chinese and trying to follow along with pictures. It may seem a big babyish, but we're going to use these until they can understand more, then move on to more complex cartoons. I'll post some more complex ones when we move on to those.

Finding our Chinese Heritage in an American Home.

My kids really don't look Asian (e.g. Monkey has hazel eyes, and Bunny was born with almost blond hair, which has now darkened to brown, but still gets blond streaks sometimes). We speak English at home.  I only cook Chinese food maybe once every 1-2 weeks. We rarely eat with chopsticks (unless it's just 'for fun'). We don't go to Chinese school. The only Chinese holiday we celebrate is Chinese New Year.

How are my kids going to connect with their Chinese heritage? 

I started out speaking Chinese to Monkey for his first 1-2 years of life, until he started speaking, and then the 'Why?' questions started, and my limited Chinese vocabulary could no longer keep up.  He could actually understand it during those years, but has since lost that ability.  It's definitely harder to keep up when one parent doesn't speak the language.  I'm not a frequent speaker of Chinese myself, as I don't have anyone else in the household to speak with. When we started homeschooling though, we made an active choice to teach him Mandarin as his foreign language.

The kids have had a on-again-off-again interest in Chinese culture. Over the years, they've asked to learn Chinese or learn how to use chopsticks. Unfortunately, the interest usually subsides soon after. Sometimes I wonder if they even think of themselves as Chinese. At one point, I tried to read a book to Bunny with a main character who was Chinese, hoping she would get a glimpse of someone else who is Asian, growing up in America, but she made a comment about how she couldn't relate, because she 'doesn't feel Chinese'.

That was a wake up call. 

Now, given, she is only half-Chinese, so the stories about growing up looking different, or having parents who don't speak English, are not going to resonate with her, but I would've hoped she felt a *little* Chinese at least.  Even if she didn't experience the same emotions, to be able to connect with experiences that her mom or grandparents went through, would have been nice.  So. I've decided to actively incorporate more of Chinese culture in our lives.  I'm trying to speak to them in Chinese more often.  I'm trying to cook more Chinese food and introduce more Chinese vegetables and foods to them.  I'm going to persevere in teaching them to use chopsticks, no matter how much food is dropped.

I realized that some of our lack of Chinese culture in our home stems from my own lack of interest in Chinese culture growing up. I was too busy trying to fit in and be as 'American' as possible. Unfortunately, that means I don't know much about Chinese holidays or traditions.  So this is a wake up call for me too. I'm going to start learning about holidays, traditions, history, and people, so I can teach my kids, in hopes they will appreciate and embrace this heritage from which they come. As a start, we did a unit on China and expanded it alot more in depth than what was in our My Father's World Curriculum.

YouTube Chinese Lessons

Since we don't have a formal curriculum for Chinese right now, I've been looking into YouTube videos.  There's a wide assortment of channels available, but the ones I've found that seem most friendly to beginners and have a whole series of tutorials (though not necessarily 'kid-friendly') are:

Learn Chinese with Chinese101 - This has a wide variety of video series, such a Chinese Holidays, Chinese in 3 Minutes, Weekly Chinese Words.

Yoyo Chinese's Beginning Conversational Chinese - This teaches basic conversational Chinese. This is VERY basic, starting from 'Ni hao'.

Yoyo Chinese's Intermediate Conversational Mandarin  - A step above the Beginning videos. They also have many other series, like Grammar. She covers alot of basis sentence structure and word order. The videos are less than 10 minutes long, usually 4-5 minutes.

None are really aimed at kids, so kids don't find it fun or exciting, but I think the content is decent, and they are produced by native Mandarin speakers (which also means they speak English with a Chinese accent, but their English is fine.)

As I find for more, I'll add to this list.

iPad Apps for Learning Chinese

I went through all the free Chinese apps that we've downloaded over the last couple years to evaluate them to find one that would be both fun and educational. I created a spreadsheet to track what features each app includes, with categories such as games, Chinese characters, pin-yin, writing practice, and kid-friendliness(based on kids under 10). (Note, this may not be 100% complete nor accurate and it is a work in progress, as I went through each app and quickly played around. There may be some features I might have missed during this cursory review and I will continue to add to this as I play around with the apps.)

In the end, we decided to proceed with paying for the full package for Kids Learn Mandarin by Fingerprint. It has a series of games the kids can play for each category, such as numbers, animals, etc. The free version only comes with numbers.

Fun Chinese by Studycat was a close second, but it has fewer categories to add on (but it is also a lot less in price for the full pack).

In general, the apps seem to fall into 3 categories:

• words with pictures (all have audio) 
• writing
• dictionary

I only included one dictionary in the spreadsheet, because it was specifically for phrases, not just words, as I didn't have much opinion regarding how good the other dictionaries were. They were generally acceptable. The writing apps were not flashy and fun, but they were functional. Maybe there's not much creativity that anyone can muster for something as mundane as writing Chinese characters.

One drawback of almost of the 'words with pictures' apps is the inclusion of only nouns. Of course, nouns are important for vocabulary-building, but you can't make sentences with only nouns. I've taught the kids basic verbs in the past few months, as well as pronouns, so they can form basic sentences, but are limited in what nouns they can use in the sentences, so I hope this new app will help them expand their vocabulary.

Learning Chinese

Now that we are homeschooling, I've been trying to teach Mandarin Chinese to Monkey.  I grew up speaking Chinese at home, went to Chinese school for 10 years, and placed out of the foreign language requirement in college because I spoke fluently enough, but rarely use it now, as my husband doesn't speak it.  I've always wanted my kids to learn to speak Chinese, but aside from Monkey's first year of life, I was unsuccessful in using enough Chinese for them to absorb. We've never done Chinese school because of the time commitment required (2-3 hours every Sat or Sun, plus homework). Fortunately, over the past 2 years, the kids at least have had Mandarin Chinese taught for a couple semesters at the public school.  Periodically, I would teach them phrases at home, but usually my efforts would dwindle after a few days.

With Monkey at home now, I figured this would be a great chance for him to really learn Chinese. I don't have a curriculum we're using yet, but my plan is to include 10-15 a day of speaking Chinese, with short lessons, introducing a word or 2 per week, and otherwise, just speaking so he gets a feel for it. (I'm really regretting not speaking Chinese around the house when the kids were younger.) We covered numbers (and I used that to drill his math addition/subtraction/mult/div facts), greetings, age, colors, pronouns, possession, and a variety of verbs such as is/are, go, want, have, eat, take, give, etc. He can put together some basic sentences and answer questions. We have not started learning reading/writing yet. I've had him watch some Chinese cartoons and language lessons on YouTube, but they really haven't been too effective yet, but perhaps I haven't been very consistent with them either. I am going to start using iPad apps for learning new words.

If anyone has any ideas for workbooks, learning packages, videos, iPad apps, etc., please let me know! I don't want to spend a lot of money on this at this point, but I'm open to suggestions.