Two weeks ago, I convinced a friend to try Skritter with her child and went through the installation process with her. I thought I’d document reasons for suggesting Skritter and also some of the issues we came across during the installation.
The Problem I Had
Last semester, if you recall my happiness at our writing curriculum, I asked Thumper to find 2 characters a day she doesn’t know and practice writing them. It’s how I’ve it done in a few of the Montessori schools I visited. The children choose characters they’re using in daily school work and learning those. The great thing about this method is that children are:
- learning characters relevant to their daily lives
- get choices in what to learn and don’t hate writing Chinese as much
- learning characters through subject vocabulary, rather than strictly through language arts.
However, the problem was despite practicing through the traditional methods of writing at least 3 times per character and using relevant characters, she was still forgetting. I felt this wasn’t working for us because:
1. We were not writing often enough. I was still figuring out my work plan and Thumper was still normalizing in the classroom. This meant that we were not practicing writing daily. I’ve come to the realization that when it comes to Chinese writing, writing daily is very important.
2. The characters she doesn’t know don’t repeat often enough. Because I’m still working on our work plan and we are not learning mostly through subjects (science, history, art, etc), she was not doing work that required her to repeatedly write the same characters. This means that even though she “remembered” them after practicing, it wasn’t coming up often enough for her to retain over the long haul.
3. She was taking too long to write compositions. It felt tedious after awhile, having to look up characters after the fact. While it made it more relevant, she was looking up too many characters (her choice to do more than 2) at the same time and most likely not retaining them.
Similarly, my friend’s problem was, “My kid keeps forgetting the characters they’re learning, even though we write and re-write.“
I think it is very typical for kids to forget a character one day and remember it the next day. You can’t get too hung up on this. Otherwise you will end up spending way too much time doing repetitious work rather than pushing ahead in your curriculum, be it writing or reading through Sagebooks. It may also have the unintended consequence of the kids disliking their Chinese work.
I’ve given Thumper character lists, to circle the characters she knows. We would be chugging along and suddenly there would be tons of characters I know she knows but she claims to not know; as well as tons of characters she keeps mispronouncing. Then, I show her the same list the next day, and voila, in just 1 day she remembers those characters again.
Similarly with Astroboy, we can be going through Sagebooks and he doesn’t seem to remember half of the characters in Set 2 when I show it to him on Anki or just bring a book out for review (we’re in set 3). And yet, he’ll happily read through most of the Set 2 Treasure Boxes with no problem except 1-2 characters.
Making Changes to our Writing Curriculum
But, despite knowing this, what if you would really really like them to recall most if not all the characters they ought to be learning? Do you just give up handwriting altogether if it seems like they just forget?
I was getting discouraged and questioning yet again if we should learn writing. After consulting with Unit-Study Mama, I realized my goal is really to have the kids learn how to write 500 characters. If they can mostly read through Sagebooks after 500, then with 500 characters down, they can probably write a lot of the frequent characeters.
Wow, now our handwriting curriculum it all seems very doable! 500 characters by 12th grade is nothing. That’s only 41 characters a each grade school year. Even if it’s 500 by 6th grade that’s only 80 characters a year. I don’t even need to do 2 characters a day.
As usual, I’m learning that not setting the bar too high actually results in less stress and being able to move forward.
So this semester, I decided to divide our writing work into 2 skills area instead. Chinese “spelling” is really about learning stroke order and recalling the correct character to use. That is separate from learning how to write.
For the spelling, I used Skritter, because it has built in spaced repetition. I had tried it myself and found that it works. It’s not repetitive writing a characters 6 times. Characters show up again after awhile. We do this just 10 minutes a day.
I was sold after 1 week, and even more so after two.
Writing by hand can be tiring for Thumper. She still holds her pencil very close to the tip, a sign that she still needs work in her pincer grip. Skritter works on the stroke order without requiring that she uses her hand. Because it uses dictation in its writing practice, it mimics what happens when we write, which is hearing a word in our head and then trying to recall it.
At the same time I made the switch, I added in a composition curriculum. Now I enforce the rule during creative writing: if she can’t write the character, she moves on and use zhuyin, and don’t come back to fill in the blanks. My goal in her writing exercise is for her to write as long a composition as she can before she gets tired. This way she really gets in her composition practice and not get all hung up on the handwriting portion.
What I noticed after 1-2 weeks of Skritter is that she is naturally recalling more characters. We have fewer and fewer just zhuyin words. She has happily told me several times how Skritter just taught her how to write a certain character.
Getting Started with Skritter
I’ve already written a post about the specific settings we use in Skritter. Here are more details on how I walked through the installation and usage process with my friend.
- Create an account with Skritter. You must have an account to use it!
- Activate your code.
- Download their iOS or Android app. Though you can use it on the computer, it’s really a tablet app.
- Configure your application to use only the writing function. Set the stroke order to 80%-100% strictness, and enable dictation (sound) function.
- Add ONE Sagebooks Character Lists. For us, we started with Sagebooks Set 1 only and added new sets as we finished old sets. You would do this by
- logging in.
- finding the relevant Sagebook list
- Click on Study List
- Click on Book 1. It will start adding from that book. (I’m using Sagebooks 3 as an example since I already added Sagebooks 1)
My friend had an issue because it was adding all 5 sets. I told her to wipe everything clean by going online to her Skritter account, click on Study menu and delete all the lists it thinks she’s studying from. It will not reset the total stats.
Note: A friend reported that she had added all 5 lists, but stopped them from being added to words being studied. But it was still adding. I bypassed the problem for her by removing all the Sagebook lists she’s not currently using. She’ll just add them back in when she starts working on those sets.
Other Tips for using Skritter
I personally have a very hard time with the Skritter web interface. It is not intuitive and information is spread across multiple menus. For example, Thumper is working on Set 1 and Set 2 characters right now. So if I want to:
1. Find out just what characters she’s learned. I click on, online,
Study menu, Sagebooks 1, Contents, Book 1
This will show me all the characters in Book 1 and their progress. If you see a highlighted green W box, it means they’ve mastered the character. A lighter green means they’re working on it.
2. Find out just how she did during her session that day. I click on, online or in app,
Progress menu
This kind of gives me stats on characters she’s learned per day, per week, per month, her retention rate, etc. The progress report is different between online and my iPad version.
3. Her progress in the current set, to get an idea of what characters she’s having trouble with. I click on, online
Study menu, Click to Calculate
or
My Words
The first one gives you a summary. The second one you can see what words are going to come up next for review or be added. You can also click on individual characters to see its stat and when it’ll come up again for review.
4. Help her know which characters to write when she hears it
As I mentioned before, Skritter is really for adults or people who are using it to learn Chinese as a second language. It gives you an English definition for every character so you know what you need to write. But my kids aren’t reading English and anyways as native speakers the definition isn’t necessarily how they know it.
As my friend says, she wishes they would give word (字詞) with each character.
I got around this by showing Thumper the little Info button on the top right corner. She can click on it when she doesn’t know which character or can’t recall how to write it. It splits the character up by components to help you remember.
But I ran into a problem where she was judiciously using the Info button every chance she got. Now I don’t know if this messes up the stat or what Skritter thinks you know or don’t know. Either way it’s to be discouraged because she’s not even trying to think about it for a few seconds before clicking. I ended up sitting with her again and keeping an ear out and telling her what character it’s looking for.
However, I’m lazy, so the new way is, she can only hit the Info button 5 times in 1 session, and if she uses it more, she needs to come and tell me. These spaced repetition software are an aid to remember what you learned, not a way to learn. So if she needs to learn her character strokes she should do it offline.
After 3 days with this rule, she proudly told me she only used the button once. I told her we’re aiming to lower the number of times she uses that button gradually and she asked me after her session to lower her limit to 4 times instead. Yay!
I’m mightily pleased with Skritter. Here’s a sample of her writing now. She would not have written this much 6 months ago (there’s a back page). And yes, I realized many other 8 year olds can remember way more than her, but writing has never been something we’ve been consistent on so this is progress on my end!
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