Bao & Bun's Bilingual Journey

One night, I was struggling with what to do about Little Bao’s reading. I’m not completely satisfied with him just reading Greenfield books. These leveled readers have very similar sentence structures and are mainly used for practicing reading skills.

I want Little Bao to read books beyond leveled readers because most books aren’t written in that structured way.

I tried using the same books I used for Little Bun, like 皮皮與波西, but it didn’t work out. There were too many characters he didn’t know, and by the end of the book, he was tired of blending Zhuyin and refused to read more books like that.

For Chinese reading, I feel there are a few key components:

1. Comprehension
2. Character recognition
3. Sounding out the Chinese characters( zhuyin or pinyin)
4. Stamina for reading longer books

Little Bao has high comprehension, but his character recognition is still weak, and his ability to use zhuyin is not very strong.

Greenfield books don’t really help with character recognition because the characters don’t repeat often enough to remember them. My biggest issue is that the books are too small, with only a few pages, so they don’t help build reading stamina. As kids start to read longer English books, I’m eager for Little Bao to branch out into Chinese reading that reflects with real Chinese books.

I reached out to a teacher from an online school with our struggle. She suggested starting with very simple books, like board books for babies, to build the habit first. She said even if he needs to use zhuyin for those simple characters, that’s fine because it still practices his zhuyin blending skills.

That’s when I brought out those baby books we used to read and had him try reading them himself. To my surprise, because the stories were so short, he read three simple Chinese picture books in one sitting. The short sentences allowed him to blend the zhuyin quicker, and the sense of accomplishment from reading these books was significant. I then went ahead and got more of those books for him to read this summer.

I recommend these books for kids who know about 100 characters and already know some zhuyin. Even though they are for younger children, it’s more about building the habit of reading and practicing blending zhuyin.