Experiment of Raising a Child

I locked up my daughter for the weekend. Well, sort of. We didn’t need to go out because it was so hot and humid. We needed to stay in because the exams are coming up in a week or so. She brought have a printout of 700 Chinese character pairs (some of them are repeated to mix with each other). Sienna has to master these: 1) reads them out correctly while understanding their meanings. 2) dictation - write them out upon without looking. There is another list that is even longer and requires only reading instead of writing them.

I was on the task to make it as painless for her as possible. These are three things that we did together.

First, we translated all the Chinese characters into English. The English words will reminds her what the Chinese is. Vise verse. We might well kill two birds with one stone. I don’t just talk about raising a child being an experiment. I am actually having fun experimenting it.

Second, I created paragraphs using the characters on the printout. And I read out so that she could write them down. This way, she doesn’t just learn words. She learns the purpose of learning these words is to put them together for meaningful writing.

Third game we played was the most fun. Sienna used my iPhone to do the dictation. She quickly mastered the skill of writing on the screen with her index finger.