Naming Your Home School

Not every home school has to have a name.  However, there are good reasons why some families choose to name their home school.  Suprisingly, it can be an agonizing decision for some.  Why go through the trouble?  Some states require a home school name as part of the registration process.  The name really does not get used for anything, but you just have to have one because the state says so.  A second really good reason to have a name is that it can be part of getting a teacher ID, which is necessary for teacher discounts at certain retail chains.  A homeschool name can also be part of your homeschool school spirit, like having a mission statement.  Finally, a home school name looks nice on a home school diploma.

How can you come up with a good name for your home school?   Some people opt for keeping it simple.  They may use (last name) Home School or (street name) Home School or (geographical feature) Home School.  These options work well if you are not actually going to share your school name with anyone, however emblazoning (name) Home School or (street name) Home School on school T-shirts, for example could be a privacy issue for your child depending on their age and where they wear the shirt.

Another possibility for the less creative is to use a name generator.  AOPS and Eclectic Homeschooler both have them.  The names they generate can be silly but they may give you a jumping off point.  Is "Heritage Family Academy" too country for you?  Try "Faith Christian Academy" instead.  Is it too stuffy or too religious?  Maybe "Oakwood School" would be better.  

If you have older children, it may be fun to involve them in the decision making.  

This brings up an important point, which is that your child will need to list their home school name on all kinds of applications in the future, so as fun as "(family name) School for the Criminally Insane" sounds now, you might want to pick something that sounds professional and respectable for future reference.  Also, remember that it can create a bad impression , or possibly create a legal trademark dispute,  if you use the name of another school as your own.  In other words, calling your school "Harvard University" is a really bad idea.  A quick internet search can help you avoid this type of trouble.  If you just really love a name, you might add a geographical designation to clearly distinguish your school from the more famous one--ie. "Columbia Homeschool of the Everglades".

Finally, remember, like many things in home schooling, your school name can usually be changed (unless it is on a diploma) if doesn't work for you.  

BINGO

Can I just say it?  Flashcards are boring.  I do use them frequently, but with kids, its so important to shake things up sometimes and play a game or two in order to keep it fun.  My kids have always loved BINGO for math facts, phonics, and just for keeping busy on a long car ride.  So why not BINGO for learning Chinese characters?

Thankfully, there are some websites which allow you to create BINGO cards for Chinese characters.  One such website is Purple Culture.  It's BINGO card generator allows you to input up to 50 characters.  You do need to be able to type in Chinese (which is easy if you know the pin yin), but the website will take simplified or traditional.  The nice thing is that it will generate the pin yin and English for you.  You don't have to type all of that in.  The downside is that if you need that, you'll have to pay a little extra.  But if you just want characters and you know or can learn the rest yourself, then it's totally free!

Arch Chinese also has a BINGO card generator that is fully customizable.  You can also save vocabulary lists and there are stored lists for some popular curricula, such as the Practical Chinese Reader.  This tool is very flexible and can be used for a number of different applications, such as picture cards.  The downside is that it takes a bit longer to learn how to use.

If you like computer games, Xuele and BBC kids both have lots of Chinese vocabulary games for kid/beginners.  Have fun playing!

3 Free Apps for Learning Mandarin

Studying Chinese on the go is a lot different today than it used to be.  Gone are the days of lugging your books, CD player and dictionary with you.  Even a couple years ago, it was tough to find apps that would support learning to read and write characters.  Today, the Internet is rife with free apps for learning Chinese.  These are some of the best for beginners.

1.  Chinese Skill
This app has a lot of features.  Each lesson contains grammar and vocabulary, both written and spoken.  It even grades your pronunciation.  It has a good balance of repetition and review and new topics.  The lessons do go a bit fast, but there are immersion lessons and games to help you round out your practice.  The downside of the immersion lessons is that there is no translation even though the dialogues presented contain vocabulary that isn't necessarily covered in the lesson.  You can also test out at one level if you have already had some basic Mandarin. All of this is completely free. 
The content is geared to adults, but kids can still use it and not learn anything inappropriate. 

2.  Hello Chinese
This app has many of the same features as Chinese and the lesson structure is very similar.  Immersion lessons are a paid feature, so this app is less able to be used on it's own in the free version.  A positive feature is that it allows you to test out on multiple levels.  Another positive feature is that it links to the Hello Chinese webcasts, which contain interesting cultural information.    Again, the content is geared towards adults but ok for kids. 

3.  Duolingo
This app is up and coming.  It is developed by users, so the content is likely to evolve considerably over the years. A downside to Duolingo is that it does not grade your pronunciation or cover handwriting at all.  The lessons I saw strictly cover vocabulary and sentence construction/grammar.  Duolingo does not let you test out of levels.  Instead, it has a placement test.  Unfortunately, the curriculum seems to be organized in a linear fashion, so that if you have already learned ba structures and the use of de adverbial phrases, but somehow you don't hear the test saying "wo men" instead of "wo", you could get placed at the beginning of the lesson sequence anyway.  However, it is useful for review of vocabulary, listening skills, and grammar.


The downside of any app is that you aren't forced to write characters over and over again, which is probably necessary to memorize them faster.  Also, the dialogues are necessarily very rigidly constructed, so that you can't review a lot of vocabulary at once.   While not a substitute for a live classroom or tutoring type experience, these apps certainly can help you learn new skills and hone old ones.  I felt that using apps was especially helpful for learning new grammar and in monitoring my pronunciation. 

Chinese Made Easy for Kids, review

We have officially finished all four of the Chinese Made Easy for Kids books.  We started when DD was 4, and I know a little Mandarin from about 4 years of Chinese School as a kid.  My parents never spoke Mandarin at home.  My father is fluent but my mother speaks Mandarin like Peter Sellers  of Pink Panther fame, speaks French.  That is, very badly.  She learned from watching movies, I think.

DD has been diligently working on her Mandarin for about 15 minutes every weekday.  We broke it down to approximately one textbook exercise and 3 written exercises a day.  For the tracing exercises I counted 3 characters as one "exercise".  About half way through the first book, I realized that the curriculum was really light on review.  I added my own review lessons about every five lessons thereafter.

Everyone always wants to know if DD is fluent.  She is far from it.  However, she has what I would call a good start.  She has a pretty impressive receptive language vocabulary of about 300 words.  She can speak sentences--stilted, but composed on her own, not just formulaic conversations.  Her topics are limited--food, personal appearance, furniture, school, pets/zoo animals, nationality and language, plus a smattering of other topics.  One cannot expect to get to fluency on 15 minutes a day, especially in a nonimmersion environment.  She can also read and write a limited amount.  She is familiar with pin yin and with counting strokes, which will get her far with a dictionary.

The strengths of this series are that it is very kid friendly and age appropriate.  The topics are things that kids would like to learn to talk about in Chinese.  The font is nice and big so that the learner can really see the strokes in the characters. The exercises are helpful and draw attention to radicals and simple words, which are the key to learning larger numbers of characters.   The illustrations are pretty funny too.

The downside of this series is that you really have to know some Chinese to teach it.  It doesn't ever really explain the grammar it is trying to teach.  You just get some sentences and have to figure out why they are put together that way for yourself.  There are some great resources out on the Internet  for this, so it's not a terrible loss.  However, it is definitely not a self teaching curriculum if you don't know any Chinese and don't have access to someone who does.  The lack of review can be a problem.  The company does publish flash cards and using these regularly would definitely help retention as the exercises do not revisit topical vocabulary very often.  We had our own flashcards (not from this curriculum) and reviewed them daily.

Overall, I was pleased with the progress DD made using Chinese Made Easy for Kids and am using it with DS as well.

Easy Steps to Chinese, Book 3, review

We got our curriculum in the mail this past week, Easy Steps to Chinese, Book 3, by Yamin Ma and Xinying Li.  This is step 2 of the curriculum and at first glance, one can see that compared to Easy Chinese for Kids, also by Yamin Ma, this series is going to be little more intense.

Looking forward, it seems like this curriculum is aimed at children in the middle years. Compared to the first step, it requires writing and typing, and while the pinyin is present for new vocabulary, it expects you to read the rest of the characters without pinyin after the introductory dialogue.

We have not purchased the teacher's manual.  Mainly this was to avoid the extra expense, but also to force me to really learn the material.

Compared to ECFK, this curriculum has a lot of similar vocabulary, but definitely adds some more age appropriate vocabulary as well.  There are more abstract nouns and more words about things middle schoolers can relate to, such as "geography" and "bill" (as in, at a restaurant) and "manager".  There are more reading comprehension passages and many more written exercises. 

While the textbook states that the lessons are designed to take about one school year, about 3 hours per week, the lessons are not divided into daily work.  This provides flexibility for programs of study which include either daily Chinese or Chinese through the whole year.  However, there are 5 units and each unit contains a review and a unit test. 

This curriculum does not appear to be self teaching.  However, if your child has a good ear, there is an accompanying CD, and by this level, he or she should be able to hear whether their pronunciation is accurate or not by comparing with the CD.  A classroom  or tutoring situation where speaking is practiced with a person who can correct tones and speech would be ideal, however.

The curriculum does not really go into Chinese culture in great detail, aside from linguistic points, such as the fact that Chinese people name each family member separately.  A separate Chinese culture curriculum is necessary to round out Chinese studies and to prepare for the AP exam or living in China.