Now that we have settled into the start of 4th grade, an overview of what the school work is looking like... Our days are still half day in English and half day in Chinese. Each day begins with the alternate language of the previous day. Specialty classes like Science, Visual Arts and P.E. are taught in English. Science and P.E. happen twice a week, while Visual Arts happens once a week. Music is taught in English this year. (During K-2 it is taught in Chinese at this school.) It happens once a week and includes some movement-based performance, as well.
The Writing Workshop model out of Columbia Teachers College continues to be employed, with increased levels of sophistication. Like the previous 2 years, the language arts units are broken down by writing styles: personal narrative, informational, persuasive/opinion, and historical or historical fiction. The Writing Workshop writing process dictates the tasks which engage them to progress through cycles of brainstorming, drafting, and editing to get to the final product.
Meanwhile, something called "Word Study" continues to be the way through which kids learn phonics and spelling, and even vocabulary acquisition.
Reading is more independent, I think. I haven't heard of any reading partners this year. The focus seems to be on logging progress and a stepped-up move toward engagement and reflection by writing "Reading Responses" - which is basically using journaling as a way to further engage the student in the material. The kids receive a list of prompts to help them think of something they would like to journal about in response to the reading they did for that day on the book of their choice.
The class, meanwhile, does have a few books they plan to read together which is selected to be just above the majority of the kids' reading levels.
Math continues to be the UChicago Everyday Math curriculum, while adding a worksheet of advanced math reasoning problems which the kids are required to do over the course of the week and turn it in at the end. These problems are more abstract and take a lot of thinking and talking through. They are not problem sets.
The Chinese language arts development aims to mimic the English framework. There continues to be character practice and sentence structures delivered through worksheets. Quizlet, as mentioned prior, is used as an additional drilling tool to check for comprehension, as well as to deliver the drill in a quiz form.
The textbook is a curated selection done by the teaching faculty over the years. The topics connect with Social Studies and Health Science themes that have been identified by the faculty as the slate of content.
Daily reading is expected, whether it be repeating the class reading from the textbook or reading your own selection.
My opinion is that the textbook readings are just at my child's level without being a challenge. So I don't make her repeat read at home, unless I notice that it is more challenging. Meanwhile, we have returned to reading one short story or one chapter per day from our own collection.
Weekly book reports have begun. So far, all the kids in the class are supposed to write from the same story. The first one was not challenging in vocabulary, but more challenging in the forms of expression. This was reassuring to me - this is part of why you send your child to school. Because professional teachers can teach your child a literary or academic form of the language that you, the parent, probably could not (unless you are a professional educator and have expert levels in the language).
The form of the book reports have regressed a bit - back to using storyboarding as a tool. But I don't mind, as I see this time as also giving my child a break and allowing her to find moments of mastery. Always making things hard can have negative blowbacks.
The school has developed its own math in Chinese that follows the Everyday Math curriculum directly translated. They have also been mapping this material to the Common Core, which is labeled in the math workbooks. It makes me wonder if some of the Everyday Math is not exactly mapped to Common Core - likely. So what we get delivered to us is just that.
The Chinese teacher said that she will give students advanced math in Chinese from another curriculum, should some of the students show that they are ready for it. My child does not seem ready - the math reasoning of the language expressions in Chinese and English are different enough, in my opinion, that this is challenge enough. I am not looking for her to master math in Chinese. By 6th grade, math will be taught all in English. I have some additional thoughts on this that ought to go in a separate post...
The plus for having it now is the Chinese literacy support that happens. All the instructions for the worksheets are in Chinese, as are all the story problems. Most of the characters do not have pinyin over them. So if they did not learn them during class, then they have to look them up.
Overall, however, I am grateful for the levels and the quality of teaching. When we were in K and at another MI school, it was very hard to see what laid ahead, to know what to expect. Now, I see very clearly that there is no way that the 4th graders at our previous school would have ever been able to reach the level we are at now. Not for anything happening in English, not for anything happening in Chinese. These last 2 years of hard work are paying off, are the foundation for my child to continue the hard work that lays ahead.
When I have a chance, I will post more concrete examples...
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