kirchara

Living Mandarin is a curriculum expressly written for non-native Chinese speakers. The textbooks use both traditional and simplified characters. The curriculum is not text-heavy, so you would need to add at least one set of leveled readers to teach your child.

The textbooks have traditional characters, simplified characters above the traditional characters (as needed), pinyin under the Chinese characters, and zhuyin to the right of the traditional characters. Traditional characters and zhuyin are black, simplified characters are gray, and pinyin are red. In addition to zhuyin to the right, they also included an older form of romanization underneath pinyin (as needed) in green. I bought levels 3 (my kids' approximate level) to 10.

The text is written horizontally from left to right, beginning from kindergarten levels all the way to level 10. The horizontal orientation is great because most Chinese reading pens only scan horizontally.

The sets I bought did not come with music CDs* or an e-Pen. When you purchase directly from their website, the sets come with CDs. If you can read Chinese and are teaching your children yourself, the CDs and e-Pen are probably not necessary.

* not good music

Living Mandarin sets so far goes up to Level 10 instead of 12:

- Teaching bopomofo (1 textbook + 1 workbook)
- Kindergarten levels 1 to 3 (1 textbook + 1 workbook per level)
- Levels 1 to 10 (1 textbook + 2 workbooks per level)

According to their website, ( Read more... )

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You can look at some of the inside pages here:

- My Instagram post
- Issuu pages on their website. Click on each book and click on the "試看試聽" (Take a look/give a listen) tab.

( Pros and Cons of this curriculum )

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I am pleased to find that level 3 is the correct level for my kids. I cover the pinyin with a reading ruler when they read and only uncover it when they do not know the character(s). My kids seem to automatically read the simplified characters and do not find the zhuyin distracting. My older one quickly figured out that zhuyin includes tones.

We have been doing Mandarin regularly since summer break. I am hoping this schedule will continue for a while, before things get hectic again. We rotate between Odonata (currently reviewing Book 4.4), SageBooks (reviewing Book 3.4) and XQKD (Book 3 Lesson 3). Sometimes we sing/learn a Chinese song or do a game/activity in Chinese instead.

We go over each textbook lesson in two sessions, and both workbooks in two sessions. For now, I plan on skipping up to half of the writing exercises to cut for time.

My tentative lesson map: ( Read more... )

You can teach your kids Shakespeare from as young as seven. Brooks was 5.5 years old when he had these lines memorized, just because he’s heard River repeat it so often:

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Here is what River (then 8 y.o.) wrote about A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Oberon, who is furious at Titania, wants the Indian boy to work for him as a squire. Titania replies, "No, this is the son of a beloved friend." Oberon angrily takes revenge by making Titania fall in love with the first thing she sees, a man with a donkey's head. Puck mistakenly puts the flower's juice on the wrong person's eyes. Instead of making Demetrius fall in love with Helena, he ends up making Lysander fall in love with Helena. Since Titania is in love with Nick Bottom and isn't thinking right, Oberon successfully takes away the Indian boy. After he has the boy, Oberon reverses the enchantment on Titania.

I use three books to teach River Shakespeare:

1) Ken Ludwig’s How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare

2) Mary & Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (This book preserves Shakespeare's language. Don’t get any other Shakespeare “summaries” because it’s useless)

3) my college textbook The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Longman, ed. David Bevington).

Bonus: Gareth Hinds’ Romeo and Juliet graphic novel, which uses actual Shakespeare lines. (The wedding night scene is tame and truncated, FYI.) I personally love his recasting of Romeo and Juliet as other races to show that Shakespeare is universal.

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Below is a timeline of River’s Shakespeare journey, from age seven to twelve:
( 7 to 12 years old )

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More information about the contents of the books below:

1) How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare by Ken Ludwig
The book website has free audio recordings of the 26 Shakespeare passages in the book.
Get a hardcover because you'll be using this book for years. The edges of the hardcover is intentionally ragged, FYI.

( List of plays and passages in HTTYCS )

2) Tales from Shakespeare by Mary and Charles Lamb
The comedies are rewritten by Mary, and the tragedies are rewritten by Charles.
Your library probably has a copy you can borrow. If you're buying a physical book, be careful to get a good quality one, because some versions are just poorly photocopied pages bound in a book.

( 14 comedies and 6 tragedies )

3) The Complete Works of Shakespeare
You need a college textbook. Don't just get a random compilation because you need lots of good and reliable footnotes. Earlier or later edition doesn't matter; mine is 4th edition (there are now 7 Longman editions). Renting a textbook isn't that cheap so you might as well buy a used, older edition textbook.
The pages of my Shakespeare book is as thin as Bible pages.

+) Gareth Hinds’ Shakespeare graphic novels. We've only read his Romeo and Juliet graphic novel so I don't know what his other Shakespeare graphic novels are like. Merchant of Venice looks promising though.
The paperback is very high quality and have nice thick covers so you don't need to get a hardcover version (unless you want to).
Hinds has also written & illustrated Macbeth, King Lear, The Odyssey, The Iliad, Beowulf and Poe: Stories and Poems.