Cultivating interest in Chinese

As his classmates speak mainly English and we have somehow read more English books during bedtime reading , Cayen's Chinese has deteriorated a lot.

Hence, to rejuvenate his interest, we started to read a lot more Chinese books at night. 80% Chinese and 20% English. 

Also, Ah Pa started to teach him how to play Chinese chess so now he needs to learn how to read the characters in order to play.  This is also a good game as it requires him to stop and think - very good to practise impulse control and strategic thinking. I think he really likes the game as he would initiate it as one of the games we can play after dinner and we have been playing a lot last week as I was not feeling well and it's a good quiet game to play. 

Lastly, to encourage reading, I told him that Chinese also has sight words (actually I don't know for sure). So as I read Chinese books, I pause to let him identify the few commonly recurring words. I started with 了 ，as he's quite tickled that every page has so many 了 ，and it was easy enough to build his confidence and interest . And then we moved on to other words like 说 etc. This is only the start but hope he continues his interest thus far ! 


In school 







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