[Chinese Curriculum] Greenfield Let’s Play with Writing Curriculum 青田來玩寫作的遊戲

This is my third in my series on Greenfield curriculum.  I also reviewed their Rainbow Reading series, their High Efficiency Character Recognition books,  and and overview of all the Greenfield curriculum.

This is a rewrite of the blog post I wrote back in 2016.  

Suitable for: 1st grade and up

TLDR: Good for the Chinese tutor / teacher who wants something different than your typical writing exercises and books.

What is Let’s Play with Writing?

Let’s Play with Writing is actually a set of 3 books from Taiwan that Greenfield carries.  It’s out of print in Taiwan for some reason.  So the only place I can buy it is Greenfield.

The introduction is several pages of why we write and what is writing.

Chapter 1 asked the child to write a composition to introduce themselves.  For example, here’s the equivalent in English.

“My name is Summer Knight. Summer like Summer Vacation and Knight like Knight in Shining Armor.”

Of course the child draws a picture to illustrate what they wrote.

Chapter 2 played the 文字接龍 game.  It’s to address the idea that children complain they don’t know what to write.  It asks them to practice coming up with words.  She had a really good time writing down a long list of words.  Way more words than was required in the exercise.  I felt kind of bad that I had to stop her because we had to go off somewhere.

Chapter 3 talked about grammar.   In Chinese the sentence structure is:

time + people + action + location

We talked about how in English it’s actually

time + people + location + action

The book actually wanted you to cut strips of paper out and make any sentence you want with them, as long as it fits this sentence structure.  We didn’t cut out the paper.  She just had a lot of fun making non-sensicle sentences like and writing it in the worksheet I made up.

Chapter 4 talked about how sometimes we write by re-writing.  It asked her to rewrite the lyrics of any song she knows.  She chose Happy Birthday.  Because this is a game we’ve played multiple times since she’s a child, the concept was easy for her.  I helped her with the lyrics when she got stuck and she wrote it down in our composition paper.

How did We Use the Curriculum?

Since the bought these books, I’ve used it on and off at least 3 times and also once with Fleur’s kids.

At the time, I picked Let’s Play with Writing to complement my Writing With Ease curriculum and I implemented some of the techniques, such as narrating in complete sentences or summary, into this curriculum.

Ultimately, what failed for me, and I really regret not following the curriculum all the way through, was the bane of my homeschooling existence: consistence and persistence.

I wish we’d used the curriculum before the kids outgrew them.

There is no zhuyin in the book.  But the words are simple enough that Thumper could read them all by herself.   With Thumper, we restarted the curriculum twice and each time, it was a weekly assignment she had to complete. She loves these types of creative activity and had no problem completing the assignment herself without reminder.

I didn’t even really read what she read. From my research on writing, it seems that when kids write at a young age, you should just let them write without criticism. You can work on the mechanics and grammar through other lessons, but not through their personal writing.

With Astroboy, we tried it once. But since he couldn’t self complete assignments till this year, I couldn’t consistently follow through with him. If I could, I would do the assignment with him weekly ala Brave Writer method: show him the assignments and write down what he says, be his secretary.

Brave Writer does this for young writers till they are comfortable with writing with a pencil, which is at least after 10 or 12 years old.

Sigh. 不要說了. I will try not to think about how I could have used the curriculum.

So yes, Thumper loves doing this work.  One of the reasons I was really struggling with composition was because I didn’t want to assign generic topics that are not of interest to the child.  In fact, I don’t really want to assign topics at all.

At the same time, I could tell from her past writing that she really needed to work on grammar and the mechanics of writing, like using periods and commas.  In this instance, using Writing with Ease last semester has really helped.  I’m glad we started with that first and then moved onto this.  She learned how to use punctuation and capitalization through that curriculum.  Even though that was in English, it’s been easy and quick to translate the same idea to Chinese.

We haven’t really been working on writing like say, kids seem to do in public school.  (Of the very little I’ve seen visiting public school classrooms and seeing what’s posted on the wall and what I’ve heard of how writing is done in schools.)   Last year we did just a few as part of learning Sagebooks, and then whatever she wanted to write for a few weeks when she was taking Mindfulness Class.  Her writing wasn’t that great.  She had problem connecting sentences together logically, the punctuation wasn’t there, she couldn’t write a long coherent piece, etc.  But this year, she’s been happily writing about her dreams and suddenly it’s more there.

We’re having a good time quickly going through these types of curriculum, be it Kang Xuan or this.  I pretty much leave the writing all up to her and am not correcting right now.  And yet she’s showing me finished products that are way better than last year.  I keep thinking, “We didn’t really work on this before, where did she learn how to do what the workbooks are asking of her?”

Is it that we are learning it randomly just through other work and daily living, work that isn’t out of a workbook and so hard to see progress.  Is it the Writing With Ease that prepped her for this?  Or is it that kids just need to grow into it and there’s no rush to do so many of these curriculums so early?  That’s the puzzle I can’t figure out.

Do I Recommend?

Yes? I like the idea of the book a lot. But I was not able to implement because of my inherent laziness in teaching. My ideal is apparently tossing a book to a child and they just amazingly, religiously go through a book, chapter by chapter, without me helping them. Clearly that only happens in a parallel universe, so I think this would be good for that teacher that can be consistent and knows how to implement and adapt curriculum.

Or, toss it to a Chinese tutor and see what they do with it.

The curriculum is particularly suited for the child who is creative and can run with writing prompts. If you have a child who has trouble coming up with creative content and is better at modifying content, (that’ll be me), then this kind of curriculum may be painful for them.

So, if I could do it again, with my improved ability to plan and prep, I would adapt it as a creative writing curriculum for Thumper but not necessarily Astroboy. I would follow it up with Greenfield’s 語文動動腦.

Where to Buy?

Off of Greenfield’s website. I have not seen any overseas parents reviewing this material, so I’m not surprised that none of the US based Chinese bookstores carry them yet. Again, Greenfield doesn’t tend to discount so good luck.