How our kids amaze us sometimes

Today she was fiddling with these 3 objects when she arranged them and asked me," 这个是什么？＂

Not giving me a chance to answer, she said "人！口！一！"

What she has learnt: Definitely more than what is taught.
What I have learnt: Never underestimate what you teach and how they learn (even though they may look miles away while learning!).

Being Back and Some Thoughts on Learning Chinese

Thank you for all who showed concern during my self declared almost 4 months break from blogging! Exciting things have happened.

I'm almost 18 weeks preggie with number 2! Praise God for this and it has been an amazing journey of His grace, strength and providence. I had a very challenging first trimester morning sickness, so bad to the point that I avoided watching TV and surfing the net as the bright moving flashes of images would make me really nauseous. This is partly the reason why I have not blog for such a while. Another was simply the fact that I was too zonked out being pregnant and taking care of Han by myself. Challenging! Thank God for His grace and strength each day!:)

We've decided to send Han to preschool nearly 8 months earlier than what we planned. Having 3 hours to myself to take a breather and to prepare a decent lunch and dinner for everyone in the family maintains my sanity and is a huge blessing to a preggie homemaker. We are so thankful that God provided a place at a Christian preschool just 10mins walk from our house. He gave us the last place available. Wow praise God!
Han is adjusting well to school so far and we are thankful for that. She really looks forward to going to school and talks about her form teacher everyday. :)

We still do our daily learning time at home in the afternoons. Recently I've started to teach her chinese words recognition.  Han is able to speak chinese quite fluently, but I think it's a different matter all together to learn to recognise chinese characters. I feel she's quite ready to start at this age.

I'm using this set of books, Si Wu Kuai Du. 

 It's a set of 7 books and you can order them from dangdang.com. Usually it takes 4-8 weeks to arrive. Alternatively I think a local bookshop (Ma Ha Yu Yi) at Bras Brasah Complex Level 3 sells it.

It works pretty much like the English Peter & Jane series where you teach word recognition from the most simple words and then graduating to the more difficult ones. I've started the program for about two weeks. For the first week, I taught Han 3 chinese characters and added 1 more character for the second week. It's quite an effective method and Han can recognise 4 characters now and read them when they appear in the chinese books we are reading. We are currently reading 1 Scroll chinese reader a week. You can get the Scroll readers easily at Popular bookshops. Of course you can accelerate the process by introducing more words each week. The pace is determined by you as a parent.

The books come with small hard paper cards with chinese characters on them that you can laminate and use to teach your kid. What I like about this series is the author seeks to explain the importance of learning to read chinese and introduces many creative methods of teaching chinese. It's not just a book on methodology. Please note that all the books are written in chinese.

Overall I think it's not just about methodology. We try to surround Han with a rich chinese auditory and spoken environment and make it fun for her to use the language!

Please feel free to recommend any other great resources!

Have fun watching the kids learn! :)