Recently I've been thinking about the idea of scaffolding especially now that the little one has reached 80 Chinese characters and soon to reach 100 in a couple of more months. Hopefully by mid year another 50 to 100. The question arises, how do you keep the interest level going, and balance that with English when the cognitive ability is jumping in leaps and bounds?
The idea of scaffolding is an instructional strategy that involves supporting novice learners by limiting the complexities of the context and gradually removing those limits as learners gain the knowledge, skills, and confidence to cope with full complexity of the context (Young, 1993)
How do you support character learning and reinforce self reading, finding simple books! Do they exist? Yes, but they are hard to find. Recently however through much research I've discovered Chinese Readers. The idea is they are designed to reinforce learning from the class room and in our case the "home". And they are based on theme's and learning levels, so it's easy to focus at one level and then move to the next as the vocabulary increases. Additionally the text is large and simple and is targeted towards success for the reader and this is how scaffolding begins!
A couple of good sources are, by the way they are located in Singapore and HK:
Scroll Readers and Primary Mandarin
Review of Chinese Readers
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