I would say my main goals for the Kindergarten curriculum is for my son who is 5.5 to understand real Mandarin Chinese conversations, go from speaking simple single sentences to paragraphs, and to start to read (around 230 characters) and write (around 80 characters) in Chinese.
Listening to Real Conversations
My husband and I do not speak much Chinese, so it's impossible to provide our kids with a Chinese speaking environment. So we have to turn to TV. I like some of the educational TVs on Noggins so I thought I would go and look for Mandarin speaking DVDs. Luckily I found Dora the Explorer and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse dubbed into Mandarin. I actually turned up the dial too soon and let my son watch Transformer in Mandarin once, he said he didn't understand anything and lost interest. He said he actually like Mickey Mouse because just like Dora, they repeat many times and speak slowly. My 3 year old daughter loves Dora, she doesn't care whether it's Chinese or English, she seems to understand both. As for myself, actually I can't understand what they say on Transformer either! But I think I understand maybe 60% of Dora and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Dora and Mickey Mouse speak much clearer and slower and use much simpler language. Although I think by the end of this kindergarten year, he probably has the understanding of around a 2 year old Chinese child. When we read any books higher level than 0-3 years old category, he could not understand.
Textbooks - Learning Paragraphs
After my Preschool curriculum using mostly story books, I wanted to find a real textbook/workbook to teach my children Chinese. Chinese Made Easy for Kids is the logical next step. I really like it that it starts to teach short paragraphs with pinyin (English phonic translation of Chinese) on top. I made my son read to me, I am sure he is mostly looking at the pinyin on top, but I made him sound it out and guess the meanings. It also starts to teach written Chinese, the structure of Chinese characters, how Chinese characters are formed. The textbook is very colorful and fun. My son likes going through them. The workbook is a lot of fun. I like it that he can start interacting with exercise pages, there are pages to match words to picture, puzzles, fill in the blanks, coloring, drawing pictures, and fun stuff like that.
I bought the first level which seems to be appropriate for kindergarten study, the concepts are quite straightforward as he has already learned a lot of them in his Preschool curriculum, so not a lot of new vocabularies in the first level. But writing is new to my son so we took our time to review concepts we already learned and focus more effort on learning to read and write. We did around 1 lesson every 2-3 weeks. The entire book has 16 chapters, with reviews, we were done in about 40 weeks (~9 months).
This series has 4 levels (for elementary grade 1-6) and goes through the same topics at all 4 levels but increasing difficulties, the topics are:
- Greetings
- Classroom language
- Personal introduction
- Numbers and dates
- Countries and languages
- Occupations and work places
- Modes of transport
- Colors and clothing
- Daily routines
- School subjects and facilities
- Body parts and illnesses
- Everyday articles
- Stationery
- Articles in the house
- Animals
- House and rooms
Learning to Read
Now comes the hardest part of our kindergarten curriculum, learning to read. At this same time, my son was also learning to read in English. He learned all his letter sound in preschool and can begin to sound out words. His English reading skills improved tremendously. He went from not knowing how to read at the beginning of Kindergarten, jumped to reading at beginning First grade level by Christmas and then reading at beginning Second grade level by end of Kindergarten year. The progress was amazing. Once he got the hang of putting letters together, he just flew. With this tremendous progress as the backdrop, I was very frustrated with the slow progress of learning to read Chinese. Unfortunately Chinese is not like English where you put 26 letters together in all different combinations to form words so you learn 26 concepts (letters), you can create thousands of words.
For Chinese there are thousands of characters, you need pure memorization to remember all the different characters in order to learn to read. What I also learned is that in order to start really reading anything even the simplest storybooks out on the market, he really needs to know a good set of 200-300 characters. If you think about learning maximum 10 characters every 2 weeks, that is a lot of memorization already, my son just cannot remember more than this and it requires daily review to even remember 10 characters every 2 weeks. We need to study for 40-60 weeks, that is a whole year and not really be able to read anything until we have memorized characters for a whole year! I have found some very simple one sentence per page storybooks to read during the first year. (see my next blog)
I found a set of very popular books on my business trip to Beijing, called Si Wu Kuai Du (literally translates into 4, 5 Quick Read which means Quickly Learn to Read for 4 to 5 years old). This set of books is for Mainland Chinese parents to teach their 4-5 years old to read before they go to first grade. It starts simple. The entire volume has 7 books, teaching total of 552 characters. Each book has around 10 chapters, each chapter teaches 8-10 characters, so each book teaches around 88 characters. In each chapter after the 8-10 characters are taught, it has a page of how to use the character in double words like after you learn say big 大 and cow 牛, you put together Big Cow 大牛. And it has colorful pictures to teach you simple sentences with the words you've learned. For example, Grandma's home has a big cow 奶奶家有大牛. I thought they are very good.For this Kindergarten year, we used Book 1 which teaches 88 characters in conjunction with Chinese Made Easy for Kids Level 1 to teach my son around 230 characters.
Writing
By the time my son completes this kindergarten curriculum, he can write 80 simple characters. At first again it was hard, but once he got the hang of writing he learned the subsequent ones very quickly. I like the fact that in Chinese you can combine characters to form new characters. That is how we learn the simplest characters. Look at what my son wrote.
Our Study Routine
Same as our Preschool curriculum, my son and I have our Chinese lessons 3-4 times a week, an hour each now as he is already 5.5 years old so can absorb a lot more. We spend 30 minutes practicing writing and 30 minutes learning to read. We spend the first 30 minutes alternating between the Chinese Made Easy for Kids Level 1 textbook and workbook. There is a lot of writing in both textbook and workbook. Then the next 30 minutes learning to read (recognize characters). We review characters in Chinese Made Easy for Kids Level 1 and Si Wu Kuai Du Book 1. We also always read/review a story book together to make learning characters more fun. Please see my next blog on reading.
We learn around 1 lesson about 2-3 weeks, which translates to learning around 10 characters every 2 weeks. In 9 months, we were able to learn to read ~230 characters and write ~80 characters.
One note is that we have to constantly go back to review all the characters learned and also write all the characters. What I have found is that if I don't do that, my son just forgets everything he learned a couple months ago. It's constant review of what we learned.
Pinyin
To Pinyin or Not to Pinyin. Pinyin is English phonic translation of Chinese characters. It helps to figure out what a Chinese character should sound like. For reading storybooks, I started on a very strict no pinyin curriculum. I guess because my own Chinese teacher does not allow me to read pinyin, he feels I should learn the characters and not rely on pinyin. So I passed on that attitude towards my son's learning. I found that when a book has both English pinyin on top and Chinese characters, my son never bothers even to look at the Chinese characters, he only reads the pinyin. So I decided that all his storybooks he reads aloud will not have pinyin. But then I learned that in Mainland China all children learn to read pinyin first, no Chinese characters when they are beginning school. The idea is so that the kids learn to speak first before they learn to read. Once they get the speaking part down, then as they advance in their school, first grade books usually have pinyin on top and Chinese characters on the bottom. By 2nd, 3rd grade, it's all Chinese, no more pinyin. This is a good explanation and could be a good way to learn to read. So for his Chinese textbook, there is pinyin on top for him to learn more advanced concepts, while for storybook reading, there is no pinyin so he can rely on his memory to read the characters.
Next Blog
Please see my next blog on Kindergarten reading.
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