For those of you that makes plan, do you plan for a year or a month/week/day/hour? What if your original plan did not get done? I find myself always falling behind, that makes myself uneasy. To make things clear, I am not home schooling. My daughter goes to public school. I am trying to plan after school study, which I count about 4 to 6 hours per week.

I am not sure if this is the right forum. It seems the question I ask is the opposite of this forum: how to prevent my 3.5 year old kid to interfere study time with my older kids. I work full time. I devote about 1 hour study time to my 9 year old 3rd grade kid every weekday. We pretty much only have one hour a day, during which there are so much to do, we do Singapore math, we read aloud, we learn Chinese etc. When my little one is still a baby, I carried her around while helping older kids study. When baby got more mobile, daddy played with the little one when I need to be with my older kids. But now my little one is 3.5, she demanded to study too. It is a fair request, but she can’t study the same thing as big sister yet, and when I suggest daddy do some study with her, she refused, study has to be with mommy! I feel it is her way to get more attention from me! Anyone has suggestions for such situation?

I did not realize skritter is your customized list, and I did not realize that what you posted is not one list but a group of mini-lists. Then I took back my previous comments. The list is decent. I especially like the fact you can put radical in the list. I don’t use skritter, I use quizlet, similar thing but I can’t put radical in quizlet. I want to remind you don’t be fooled by initial success. I remember my daughter started learning fast too. That gave me a false hope that mastering 3500 characters is a task easily achievable. It is not!!! My daughter flew through the first 500, then she started to rapidly forgetting, the more I teach, the more she confuse with words she already know. It took us way more time to get from 500 to 1200, still a long way to go! I now teach her words instead of characters. I made up word list for her using only the characters she already know. Example: 除，Chú (除了，除非，除法，除此以外，排除，清除，除草，开除） We read too, mostly I read to her, knowing 1200 characters is not enough to read her own grade level book. I also try talking with her in Chinese.

Thanks for your suggestion. You are absolutely right, I myself needs to read more. I tried to do that, man, it is not easy for me. And I fail to use words I learned in reading in daily life. To make things even worse, I tend to forget newly-acquired word, often I check dictionary for a word and realized I have checked this word before, I just forget again! Thinking back, I feel her reading is fairly good because we used to read together and discuss a lot in 2nd grade. But by mid-3rd grade, she started to surpass me. She reads faster than me now. We start to read together, by the time I finish one book. She is on 3rd or 4th book already. We cannot discuss any more.

I tend to agree with you. I think my daughter probably “recognize” or maybe “understand” a lot of words. But she doesn’t “use” those words, orally or written. Mostly because we parents are in the same boat, know words, but don’t use them. I am looking for ideas to help her (and myself) bridge the gap.

Native Chinese speaker here. The above posted skritter looks problematic. It has a combination of words and characteristics. It has both simplified and traditional characters. Some are not a character， but part of charcter. It does not have logic connection between the items. Remembering those is difficult Chinese is difficult to learn. Chinese has over 6000 characters. Knowing about 3500 can get you through 99% of written text, knowing about 2400 characters get you through about 97% of written text. But often, those characters by itself does not mean anything, they need to form words to make meaning. The word combination is endless. My daughter is born here, English is her first language. We have been working hard on English for several years, she knows about 1200 characters now, she can only read baby level doctor Seuss kind beginner book in Chinese, whereas for English, she can read Harry Potter quite a while back.

Hahaha, you are right on point. Those overused simple words make me feel she needs extra help. Forgive my ignorance, I myself never used a thesaurus, is there online app or book? I thought thesaurus means dictionary, I encounter a word I don’t know, look it up in the dictionary/thesaurus, understand its meaning, end of story. Is there more to that? Then I can teach my kid.

Hi Tanaqui, Thanks for your suggestion. As you suggested, here below is an article she wrote about trip to universal studio. I feel her words choice is very bland and that's what triggers me to ask this question initially, how to improve her vocabulary if our family have not been using those "big" words in our daily life. Her reading does not seem to convey to writing. Have you ever watched Despicable Me or Pets? Do you know where they come from? Well, I went on a trip and discovered these facts at Universal Studios. I drove to Universal Studios for 2 hours. Annika threw up on the way there. It grossed me out. When we got to Universal Studios, I got excited and I decided to do the Transformers ride. It was a blast. I was on a mission fighting bad guys and had a lot of fun. I rod that with my dad. My mom was playing with Annika- baby stuff. Next, I went to Jurassic Park ride. I stood in line for what seemed like 100 years. In the ride, we were peacefully floating around on a river when all of a sudden, there were carnivorous dinosaurs popping up. We went up and up and the boat went down. Whoosh! I got my pants wet and my dad did too. We decided to meet my mom for lunch. I got to eat noodles and bao zi. They were really yummy. My dad also bought turkey legs and hot cocoa. Yummy!! While I was eating, Annika and mom went around taking pictures with characters. I didn’t it because I didn’t like to but Annika somehow loves to. Once I was full, my mom agreed to do the Harry Potter ride with me. You see, my mom does not like rollercoasters that have a downward push. We put our things in a locker ad got in line. On the ride, we went to Hogwarts Quiditch. We started to go sideways. Then we entered a dark cave (my mom also does not like rides in the dark) where we saw ghouls and went upside down. My mom was screaming the whole way. When we got off, my mom suprisedly said she liked it. Then I went to Animal Actors and my mom and I saw lots of animals that belonged in movies. When we got out, we saw that my dad and Annika were also watching it but we were in different seats and we came in different times! Finally, my mom and I went on the Hippogriff ride where my mom was screaming again. This time even louder. After we were done riding, my mom said that was the scariest ride she had ever been on. When we met up with my dad and Annika, I reported what we did to my dad on the way to the exit. When I got to the part where my mom said the Hippogriff ride was the scariest ride she had ever been on, my mom said it wasn’t. I asked her if she wanted to ride it again and she quickly shut her mouth. I had a fun and exciting day at Universal Studios. I hope to go again!!!!

We used Singapore math intensive practice and felt that is the right level for us, some basic exercise and some more challenging problems.

Some background: Both parents came to the states after college to pursue graduate level study and has been working in engineering fields since then. Therefore, our first language is not English and most of our education except graduate school are not done in English. We could get by day-to-day life or our domain English with no problem but are quite limited beyond that. My daughter is 9 year old, in public school, 3rd grade. Reading is fairly good in class. Lexile level close to 1000. i realized that her vocabulary is quite limited. This means her word choice is very bland in writing. (Because we did not use “big words” in daily talking). She tends to guess word meaning from context clue when reading, she never bothers to slow down to look up a word in dictionary. If I ask her the meaning of a word in the article she just read, she can answer correctly. But without context, she does not know the word. And needless to say, she never use it in writing. so is there a good way to help her (and maybe us parents too) to improve vocabulary? I looked at wordly wise, but did not like the fact that a group of words seem to have no logic connection are presented together. Besides, my daughter recognize most of them, she just does not use those words. I tried red hot root words because I want her to learn roots, prefix, suffix etc to have a logic understanding of word and can expand on her own. Problem is not everything can be explained by that only. For example, we learned pre- means first, before. Then the book present premier, my daughter asks what mier means, which I don’t know. So we only know the word means first/before something but still don’t know the exact meaning just by knowledge of root words. I suspect other materials from root words perspective may have same issue. Any suggestions?