It's a new year, and with it, I feel invigorated with new hope for the future, as well as some trepidation. Since I last posted, my son had stayed home for a while, until yesterday when we finally sent him back to school. It has been a good run at home. He worked on biking, math, and Chinese many days. After the holidays though, he started feeling sad and really missing his friends, so when the local COVID numbers became more reasonable, we sent him back to school. We are still incrementally working on Chinese with L, in order to maintain some academic rhythm to our days. I think he is now up to recognizing about 50+ Chinese characters. I still make and use the flashcards, where I put out the recent characters and their associated pictures for him to match up, but when he picks up a pair, he also uses it in a sentence. I find it is both a good way to make the review feel less tedious (more active on his part, and he can make it fun by constructing whatever sentences he wants), and also a sneaky way to encourage him to speak in more complex ways. A little while ago, I also pushed back and asked him -- my first time ever making this explicit request -- to try to speak to me only in Chinese. When he asked me why, I explained it this way: "We should always be improving and practicing something. You can already express yourself very clearly in English, so now it is time for you to practice speaking in Chinese. Once you are able to speak Chinese fluently, we can practice something else, like maybe Spanish." I found that framing language learning this way helped to avoid power struggle, because I did not say, "Chinese is part of my heritage and I think it's important for you." At his age (4.5), anything that helps to diminish power struggle is a win in my book. I also struck a compromise with him that if I notice he is trying to mostly speak Chinese to me during the day, then at bedtime, I would read to him bilingually. Else, I would read only in Chinese, since he needs the extra Chinese exposure. He thinks that is a reasonable compromise, and overall I have noticed a really good effort from him most days. When he forgets, I remind him either with an exaggerated, "Haaa??" or I give him a sentence starter in Mandarin, by translating the first part of his thought into Mandarin. He responds pretty well to both forms of reminder, and I am so proud to see that his language grasp is slowly improving. (He now asks me to teach him transitional phrases like "because" and "therefore", instead of just saying them in English, interleaved with Chinese. I think that is a really positive sign.) We have been biking and hiking a lot as a family since I last blogged, which has been a sanity-saver, because during this COVID winter we have not been seeing many friends, even outdoors. We also went sledding twice since winter started. Since my son was out of school between Thanksgiving and mid-January, for two recent weekends in a row, we have met up with his daycare friends for a playdate on bikes. Super surprising to me is that my son, who is physically VERY anxious to take risks, is actually a pretty confident pedal biker now. I honestly attribute it to him learning to bike on hand-me-down cheapo bikes that cost either nothing or just $20. He is on a free-to-us 16-inch bike at the moment, and it has a solid frame and weighs quite a lot. It is far from the fast, light bikes that I initially considered buying for him, but he has adjusted to it and rides it up a small, steady hill (130 feet of elevation over a mile) without resting. That particular route to the park includes some minor street riding as well, along a quiet street, and one time he was ahead of me at an intersection (I was walking his baby sister in a stroller) when I saw him waving to signal a driver through the roundabout. My big kid is growing up so fast! (I can't believe we are signing him up for Kindergarten right now!!) A particular delight for me recently has been to see my younger toddler blossom. Due to torticollis, she has received PT and OT help since last February, and SLP help since October. In the last couple of months, she has grown an astonishing amount, that all of her experts are ready to graduate her from their services. It has been amazing to see her improvement, and as her mom and primary caretaker during the day, I know it is no accident. More than any help she has received, she is such a determined little gal and just chooses a task and works herself at it until she gets it. She learned how to put together a jigsaw puzzle this way, over the course of several weeks, even though in my mind I thought it was way out of her reach, and similarly, just this week I saw her slaying a pretty complicated shape sorter stacking toy that she definitely could not do at the start of January. I forgot to mention Christmas, but this was the first year that my son wrote a letter to Santa. (He wrote it himself because I thought it would be a cool and semi-academic task for him to do, and actually it was pretty legible except for two important words being jumbled together. He asked for "a train" and Mercy Watson chapter books. "Santa" gave him train pajamas and two Mercy Watson books, which he promptly started reading on Christmas.) We dropped the letter off, and he was able to get a personalized response back in the mail! He was pretty excited that Santa's elves commented on his good manners in saying "Please" and "Thank you" in his request. We managed to make it a special Christmas, filled with many new traditions, even though we definitely missed traveling to visit the grandparents. Lastly, we are embarking on some new endeavors at the moment. I am currently food-training my 4.5-year-old, potty-training my 1.5-year-old, trying to sign up for Kindergarten / research after-school care options for next school year, learning new digital-teaching tools, and simultaneously trying to find a teaching job for the fall while still being a SAHM and tutoring on the side. That's probably story for another time, but, needless to say, there is never a dull moment around here.
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At the moment, miraculously, I feel the least anxious that I have felt in months! We sent our son back to daycare for about a month, and then a few days before Thanksgiving, I decided to pull him out again. We told him that he would stay home with me for at least two weeks after Thanksgiving and for two weeks after Christmas, but in reality, I am prepared to keep him home all through December and mid-January if the local COVID numbers don't look good. I was really hoping that his daycare families would be cautious for Thanksgiving, but he came home the week of Thanksgiving to let me know that most of his friends were planning to go over to someone's house for Thanksgiving dinner, and that one of his daycare families kept one sick and coughing twin at home while sending the other one to school. The combination of those two pieces of news was just a wee bit too stressful for me, so I was honest with my son and asked him if he would feel alright if we kept him home even for the few days before Thanksgiving. He responded brightly, "Sure," much to my relief and surprise. So, back to being holed up with just our sweet and screamy little family, for a little while. Even though my kids are loud and needy and they suck up all of my energy, I really enjoy having both of my kids home. We have had a rare stretch of sunny, dry weather this week, and my son was able to get back on his pedal bike for the first time in about two months. This week, he has been riding his bike, while I push his little sister in a trike stroller, to go to a park a mile away from our house. It's a decent ride because it's uphill to the park and downhill back, and because he was out of practice, the first day I had to push his bike uphill for the last few blocks leading up to the park. After the first day though, he has been able to make it there and back, and is quickly re-gaining his confidence on the bike. (We don't have a fancy bike for him. Actually, the bike he rides is heavy, rusted, and very basic. It has back-pedal brakes and no gear-shifting, the handlebar looks quite worn, and I got it for free. So, I empathize when he finds the hills challenging and thinks hopping on and off the bike is cumbersome, but I also think it builds... stamina?!) We usually spend most of a dry morning getting to the park, playing, and getting back. I do squeeze in a short math lesson every few days, mostly to keep him thinking mathematically. Speaking of math, L is doing very well with visualizing quantities under 10, which makes this math mama very proud! For example, if I show him a picture of 7 dots, he can quickly tell me that he sees 7 dots, because he sees 3 and 3 and 1 more. I am starting to work with him on making subtractive statements like, "I have 7 dots on my card, and you have 2. I win this round (of War) because I have FIVE extras!" With only a little bit of help from me, he also has learned to skip-count by 2's, up to 10. He says, "2, 4, 6, 8, 10!" and actually understands what it means to count by 2's, so I am now trying to add on a bit more, to encourage him to skip-count by 2's up to 20. Recently, he looked at our scrambled Advent calendar and re-arranged the drawers to be in the correct order. He also told me that he counted there to be 12 Advent drawers on each side of the train, which made a total of (he counted) 24 drawers, "because 2 and 2 make 4!" It is so fun to hear him making his own mathematical observations, even though he would probably not peg himself as being particularly mathematical. We have also been continuing with our Chinese lessons, which happily only last about 5-10 minutes per (week)day. I alternate daily between doing 1 or 2 new characters out of the Sagebooks, and just doing review. When we review, L either fishes out the characters to form a sentence that I dictate, or he reads sentences that I create. I think we are up to about 35 characters now that he recognizes, and the best part is that he is still enjoying it! We are moving at the right pace for both him and me, and 5-10 minutes is just the amount of focus I can get from him at the end of a day, with his rambunctious sister running around. (See below - picture from about a month ago!) Lastly, I am a proud mama today of my son, because he learned to zip up TWO of his jackets by himself. He did those two zippers each once yesterday and twice today! He also recently learned to put on his socks without stretching them out. He's just emerging to be a big kid all around. So proud of this kid! Now, if he could just be consistently nice to his little sister...
A few posts back, I briefly mentioned that I had just started teaching my son to read in Chinese. After some back and forth and asking my son for his opinions on Sage 500, I bit the bullet and ordered the Sage 500 system today! I am not sure how it will go, but at $420 (which includes the international shipping, 5 sets of books that teach the most commonly used 500 characters over the course of 500 lessons, plus some leveled picture books to go with the lessons), I felt like it would be worth the investment -- particularly because it is a fraction of the daycare costs we are still paying for every month, without actually sending him to daycare. I have been using just Set 1, Book 1 with my son to try it out before purchasing, and it has been surprisingly both fun for him and easy for me. Realistically, I don't know if he will ever become fluent in reading Chinese while growing up in America, and that's okay. To me, short Chinese lessons at home are an easy way to offer him both cultural appreciation and extracurricular enrichment, so, why not? His speaking has come a long way since the start of COVID (even when I was in the bathroom the other day, I heard him explaining something to his toddler sister in Chinese, and on a separate day I heard him reading to himself in Chinese while looking at an English book during quiet time), but he isn't a fluent speaker yet; even though he sounds pretty clear to me, the speech-to-text feature on my phone often cannot transcribe what he is saying to the correct characters, and it does not have the same issue when I am speaking. I am hoping that reading will help with L's Chinese-speaking to improve its clarity/enunciation, the way reading in English has helped him to better enunciate certain words like "immediately" and "crayon." I also hope that having some basic Chinese reading skills will affirm his ethnic identity and build his confidence as a Mandarin-speaker. I thought I would share what has worked well with us thus far in our beginning home lessons. Right from the start, I decided to incorporate matching cards to help L with reviewing the learned characters everyday, both because long-term memory is not my own strong suit in learning and because I think it is a good opportunity to normalize a good study habit/strategy. Before we go into a new lesson, we always warm up by going through the deck of cards we have so far, for him to match each picture to a learned character (see below). Whenever possible, I try to make the definition cards pictorial only, because I think linguistically it's more beneficial for our brains to match a concept directly to Chinese, rather than from a concept to English, then to Chinese. As my son matches the cards, he also sounds out the character (since L already knows the language natively, this part is easy for him. I am trying not to introduce pingyin because I have read from other parents online that it can become a crutch to always be looking for the pingyin, when we want the kids to build direct visual recognition of the characters; I also don't want to confuse L when he is reading in English, because there are some differences between pingyin and actual English phonetics). After the matching warm-up, I usually collect the cards and put together a short sentence comprised of some of the characters that we have seen, then ask him to sound out the sentence from sight based on his visual knowledge of the characters. Today, I tried to orally dictate a sentence and have my son fish out all the characters from the pile to create that sentence visually. (I do this because he is too young for me to ask him to write the characters. We run his fingers along the printed characters in the book lessons to reinforce stroke recognition/memory, but I don't actually expect him to write out a character or a sentence independently.) I dictated two short sentences, and both times he did very well in choosing the right characters to formulate the sentence! I did not give him a new lesson today, since he was excited about reading our library books from yesterday. I feel like the consistency of practice, rather than quantity of characters, is what I would like to shoot for as we slowly build L's reading vocabulary. We are going about this casually, so every week we cover only maybe 3 or 4 new characters. At this rate, it could easily be 3 or 4 years before we finish the 500 characters, and I am mentally prepared for it to be a years-long undertaking, while determined to keep it fun.
I am excited to have made this decision to embark on this -- frankly, unexpected and -- ambitious journey with my son! Let's see where it will take us. PS. I decided to go with the Simplified Chinese curriculum, because as a Traditional Chinese reader, I am always frustrated by how prevalent the Simplified characters are, and it is not always easy for me to read them. I feel like L would have a better chance of encountering Simplified Chinese (which is used in Mainland China) in his life. Plus, teaching him would give me an opportunity of getting up to speed with recognizing the most common Simplified characters myself. It's fall, and I love fall. I love when the leaves change color; I love the breezy, dry fall days; and I love Halloween. This year, I wanted to make the fall season feel special for my children, even though they are not going to school. I decided to pull together Halloween costumes for the kids, even though trick-or-treating may not happen this year. I offered my son a few options: Elephant & Piggie; a train; something generic like a tiger; or a train signal. He was exuberant about the prospect of being a train signal, so we have been working on this costume together the last few days. He helped me cut, paste, paint, and color in parts of his costume with a marker. I had to let go of my perfectionist tendencies, but I am really quite happy about the joint effort thus far. (PS. My son proudly told my husband, "Dada, I colored this in. You see that C, I, and N? That's me. I did that." It's funny that he thinks it needs to be clarified. I also decided that we would make a series of Halloween crafts throughout the month, and use them to decorate our living room. (We have a little bit of reusable Halloween decorations that I can dig up, but I feel like it would be fun for him to make the bulk of our decorations this year, since he normally would do the same at school.) I found a site with lots of easy ideas here, and made a run down to Joann's Fabric to get supplies during my kids' naps this week. I helped my son make a spider with googly eyes earlier this week, and tonight we did a family crafts night after dinner, and made three different skeletons to hang up. Can you guess which one is my son's? We have also begun learning to read Chinese characters! I bought a single book from Sagebooks 500, which is like the Bob Books of Chinese, designed for native speakers who wish to learn the written language. I bought one booklet (Set 1, Book 1), used, from a local parent, for like $5 or $10. I wanted to just try it and see whether my son would be interested at all, because he has shown a lot of interest in speaking and practicing Chinese lately. We are only three days in, but thus far he has been really excited to do the lessons everyday! The system seems like it will work well for him, so much so that my husband who is really budget-minded has supported the idea of buying the entire system to be shipped to us internationally. (The entire system costs about $550, and teaches 500 of the most common Chinese characters. Similar to Bob Books, the kids are empowered to read illustrated short sentences and leveled books independently, after learning a new character in each lesson. It receives raving reviews from parents, but I still have not yet decided if I would order the whole system new or if I should hold out to buy it used.) I decided that I would start to make and use matching cards with L to help him reinforce his visual memory of the characters, and today was the first day that we used the matching cards I made, and he was totally into it! I would show him a picture, ask him what it shows, and he would say it to me first in English then in Chinese, and then go find the character that represents that object. Overall, I still really enjoy spending time with the kids at home everyday, and cherish this once-in-a-lifetime chance I have to be my kids' teacher. I have also signed up for a free online class on teaching early childhood math, that I think is going to be really helpful for me in terms of working on math at home with my kids and bridging the gaps between my identity as a mom and a high-school math teacher. I have just started the course, but I am encouraged to see that the early concepts in the course map almost exactly to what I have seen from my son, and what I have done with him at home based on my math-teacher instincts and research. More on early-childhood math later, but the premise of that online class is that most kids are ready to explore mathematics starting at age 2. That is absolutely what I believe already!
My first child, L, was born in 2016. I started to speak to him in Mandarin from the earliest days, and his dad has always spoken to him in English. We gave him an English first name and a Chinese middle name, because we wanted him to be raised biculturally. I was fortunate to be able to take a year off from work in order to stay home to care for him, and we hoped that this would give him a strong start in learning Chinese. For many months, I had no idea whether speaking to him in Chinese made an impression. But, when L was about 10 months old, I asked him one day to hand me a ball. He hesitated a little and came over and dropped the ball in front of me. I tried making the same request a few more times, surprised by the fact that all of those months of seemingly talking to myself were coming to some very basic level of fruition.
When my son was 13 months old, I returned to work and he started attending a traditional American daycare. Within the first week, L learned to fall in line with all of the other young toddlers. He could sit at a kids' table to eat (instead of a high chair, like we put him in at home), sit down when the teacher took out a book to read, and lie down and actually stay on a cot during nap time. He learned to verbalize "no" almost immediately. Over time, what few Chinese words he was speaking gave way to a rapidly expanding English vocabulary. It did not make sense for us to send him to a bilingual daycare, because our daycare had amazing teachers and was super affordable (as it was subsidized by a local church). I did not give up on speaking Mandarin to L at home, however. In fact, I doubled my efforts. Whenever we would read a book together, I would translate it into Chinese on the fly. As the books we read to him became more complex, I would first read them bilingually to introduce the Chinese and English equivalence, and then switch over to reading solely in Chinese after a couple of times of reading through the same book. This definitely made a positive impact, because recently I was asked to read in Mandarin to a friend's child who was in a first-grade Mandarin immersion program. Before the video conference session, I chose many books at different reading levels, because I did not know what would be appropriate for that kid's Mandarin comprehension level. In the end, the exchange affirmed for me that L's auditory comprehension has definitely benefitted from my reading to him. He can pretty comfortably follow a story in Mandarin alone, at a complexity on par with his English comprehension, even though his speaking may not always show the same fluency. English dominated L's interactions at school, but as his oral language was budding around age 2 or 2.5, like many kids, he wanted to know that he was being understood. Whenever he would babble something in toddler English that only my husband and I could understand, instead of repeating his words in English, I would enthusiastically state their equivalence in Mandarin to show that I was understanding him. At one point, when L was feeling playful and wanted to show off, I picked up a picture book of 100 introductory words and found that he was able to say most of them in Mandarin. Sometime after L turned 3, we started to work with him on making polite requests in English, because he started to bark orders at us on the daily (honestly, still an issue now at 4). Around the same time, I started to require that he made those requests to me in Mandarin only. At first, it was very simple phrases: 媽媽幫我倒牛奶; 媽媽幫我拿叉子; etc. ("Mama, help me pour the milk. Mama, help me get a fork.") If he needed help formulating the sentence, I would help him with it, piece by piece, but require him to repeat the entire sentence coherently at the end, in order to get what he asked for. He was annoyed at first, but as time went on, the requests came more and more easily. It was like the little bit of Mandarin speaking was unlocking an entire area of his brain. Gradually, his sentences became more accurate and more complex: 媽媽幫我拿一半的bagel,不要考,可是要塗 cream cheese. ("Mama, help me get a half bagel, not toasted, but with cream cheese on it.") He began to take risks in speaking Mandarin. I was ecstatic a few weeks ago when he attempted to make a joke in Mandarin. (Sadly, the moment passed and I can't remember what the joke was. But, more recently he also made a rhyme: 熊很兇! He felt pretty pleased with himself thereafter. I am so glad he is starting to think expressively in Chinese.) The introduction of a second baby, plus COVID shelter-at-home, has also helped my child #1 to acquire more Mandarin confidence. Since March of 2020, he has been staying at home with me instead of going to his beloved daycare. During this time, we do lots of things (that is story for another day), but most of the time I speak and read to him in Mandarin only. A few weeks ago, he started to narrate what he is doing in Mandarin to his little sister. She is not yet talking and probably does not understand much of what he is saying in Mandarin, but I think it is so sweet that 1. He will be a second person, in addition to me, who speaks to her in Mandarin, and 2. He thinks she understands his budding toddler Mandarin. About a month ago, when we were camping, I heard my son reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See? to himself in Mandarin, from memory. It is a super simple and formulaic book, but he read it perfectly. After that, I began to challenge him by skipping parts of sentences in many books, and waiting for him to fill in the missing parts in Mandarin. I just wanted to keep him vocalizing and to keep expanding his confidence in his oral vocabulary. I realized recently that L is speaking more and more Mandarin daily. He speaks even when we are outside of the house, even when his dad is around. Now, when he speaks, I no longer do a happy dance every time. It has become part of the new background noise of our chaotic house. I wish it did not take a pandemic for my four-year-old to begin to speak Mandarin. But, I will add his speaking Mandarin to the list of things that bring me gratitude at the end of a day. When I read Trevor Noah's book Born a Crime, one of the things that resonated deeply with me was the fact that although Noah does not look like folks in any of the South African tribes (as his dad is white and his mother is black), his ability to speak the tribal dialects was what qualified his belonging in all the groups, which possibly saved his life on at least one occasion. This resonates with me because my kids are biracial. By physical appearance alone, white folks think my son looks Asian and Asian folks think he looks white -- a foreigner by all measures. (Even as a baby, when I took him by myself to a bakery in Monterey Park, CA, the store clerks asked me whether his dad is white, because he is so fair.) Noah's story reinforced for me the necessity to teach my children to speak Chinese. If they could speak Mandarin, then they will share immediate kinship with others who speak the same dialect.
Ever since my son L was born, I started to speak to him in Mandarin almost exclusively. For a long time, I was not sure it made any difference. My parents lived out of state, and because my mom was terminally ill, she was never able to travel to us, and my son had only limited exposure to his grandparents during our brief visits. (I visited regularly, but since my mom was often in the hospital, I usually left my son at home with my husband and travelled solo.) I was the only person who regularly spoke to my toddler in Mandarin. I remember the first time he responded to a Mandarin command to hand me a ball. I was elated! From that point on, I continued my commitment to read to him in Mandarin as much as possible. Whenever we would get a new English book, I would read to him initially in both languages (English and Chinese), and then slowly transition to reading solely in Mandarin as I ironed out the most natural translations in my own head. Recently, I started following a Facebook group of parents who are teaching their kids to be equally fluent in Chinese and English. I was surprised by the kids' fluency in Chinese, even after being raised abroad! Some of their children can debate in Chinese and read and memorize lots of academic facts in Chinese, seemingly on par with their peers who grew up in Asia. It forced me to reflect about my goals as a parent. How much fluency do I want for my children? How much am I willing to push them in order to accomplish that goal? Short version (this is no judgment to anyone else, just my personal view for my own children): I think it is most important for me to facilitate an interest and a basic oral foundation of the language. I want to lay down a foundation so that if either of my children were to be interested in becoming fluent in Mandarin, they could do so without too much barrier. But, if they decide that it is not something that is important to them, like anything else in life, I cannot force it upon them simply because it is my hope for them to achieve proficiency. This is already a long post. In a future post, I will follow up with what I have already tried to do and what I have seen in L, my oldest child. I would also love to hear from you, if you are also a parent of a bilingual household! What are your long-term goals for your children? |
About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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