Age: Almost 8!
Grade: 2nd-3rd grade (低中年級)
Pages: 261
Yippie! Another hump crossed on the reading front. After starting with the 亮亮 series, then the Arnold Lobel series, then dropping the 偉君 series halfway, Thumper finally finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Chinese today. For me, each of these are one level harder than the previous.
I think the biggest reason she was able to stick with this long book was because 1) she had already watched the movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and 2) Baba already read her the book in English as well 6 months ago. So even if she doesn’t understand everything in Chinese, she could guess since she’s see/heard it in other formats.
Our zhuyin class definitely helped as well. She finally figured out some of those pesky combo sound like ㄨㄥ, ㄧㄥ. This is useful when you’re reading transliteration of English names and really need to know your zhuyin. Combined with our Read Alouds……I guess the moral of the story is, if I really want to improve something, I really need to work on it every day.
http://www.srbook.com.tw/action/10109_RoaldDahl/images/KL110X.gif
I don’t think I need to go into details about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory itself. Thumper really loves this Rald Dahl series that finally arrived from Taiwan this summer. This translated series has the following book titles:
- Matilda*
- The Twits
- The BFG*
- George’s Marvelous Medicine
- The Witches*
- Danny the Champion of the World
- James and the Giant Peach*
- Fantastic Mr. Fox*
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*
- Charlie and the Giant Glass Elevator
The * titles are the ones she’s been read to in English. I think I will continue going through the route of finding books for her that have both English and Chinese versions. I have heard that if they read one maybe they won’t want to read it again in the other language. Thankfully we’re not quite there yet as we’re reading to her in English and she’s reading herself in Chinese.
srbooks.com.tw website has a webpage for all of these books, as well as excerpts in PDF format if you want to see how hard it is, how much illustration is in each book, etc. Here’s the excerpt for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The funny thing is, once Thumper was half way done with this book, we went to the Oakland Library and borrowed the Magic Treehouse. Apparently she read the whole book in the car on the way home and I didn’t even know it! It was a quick read for her. I picked up the book again today and saw just how much easier it is now for her, with its bigger fonts and shorter book. So I may go back now and borrow that whole set. She still loves reading picture books and Elephant and Piggie and “easy” books and resists when I suggest other thick books to her. So I will chalk this up to Roald Dahl being just her cup of tea.
Oh, last but not least, the grade level is my research of when children in Taiwan are reading this book.
Follow up:
Now that Thumper’s done with a longish book, I finally made the book report I wanted to make in Chinese. And the reading log. I’ve heard seen that one thing people do is to ask the child to copy a passage they particularly like in the book. I understand the intent of this, but I would hate having to find a passage when I just really love to read. Similarly, I’m not really sold on the idea of a book report either. But I want to try it at least and see what benefits it could have. For the reading log, I’m going to log it myself right now instead of asking Thumper, because that is one to many follow ups for her to keep track of.
Thanks for sharing the content of books. I always try to finish my web shopping of books before leaving for Taiwan because of other engagements during our short stay. This box set is a must have.
Hi, I’m going to homeschool my children this fall. Any suggestions on how you integrate both mandarin and English into the curriculum? I don’t want my kids to miss out the opportunities to speak Chinese, but I’m afraid their English level would not be good enough when they stay home with me.
I couldn’t say unless I know your kids chinese level.
Generally unless you’re a dual chinese speaker household this will not be an issue. Homeschooling doesn’t mean they spend all day at home. So they will be taking classes in English. As long as you provide conversational English opportunities your kids spoken English will be fine.
A lot of academic English is learned though reading and studying the language.
Lastly as the kids move up in age you can either switch more to English or start sending them to more outside classes.
When they’re young it’s the conversation that’s important and that’s fairly easy to provide if you send them to classes. In fact if you have a specific chinese level you want to reach it’s hard to get there without some curtailment in the beginning.