Bao & Bun's Bilingual Journey

Since returning from OCAC in May, I’ve wanted to see more consistent progress in my kids’ Chinese studies.

I’ve noticed many families use platforms like LingoAce, Lingobus, or Wukong to track their kids’ progress, but since our plan is to go back to OCAC each year, using the Taiwan elementary school curriculum seemed like a natural choice and we decided to go with 1-on-1 tutors for both kids.

For about 2-3 months now, Little Bao’s tutor has been working through the textbooks. The tutoring sessions are only 30 minutes long, so it’s challenging for her to cover a lot, but I’m impressed by how much she manages to teach in that short time. Each session includes characters, sentence structure, punctuation (which is actually quite cool), and words with multiple pronunciations. It’s hard to tell yet if the classes have significantly improved Little Bao’s Chinese, but I appreciate the diverse approach that touches on all aspects of the language.

One downside of this particular tutor is the lack of review materials after the classes. There is minimal homework suits him since he doesn’t like it, but I often feel there should be more review during the week—30 minutes alone doesn’t seem like enough. I’ve asked the teacher twice to provide review materials, and she has when requested, but I’m unsure if this will be consistent.

Little Bun’s tutoring is quite different. Her teacher prepares lots of review materials like worksheets, reading assignments, and writing exercises, but doesn’t follow the textbook as closely. What I really appreciate is how the teacher picks out advanced phrases from the bridge books we read for class, writes out definitions, and creates practice worksheets. This is something I’ve wanted to do for her but haven’t had the bandwidth for. However, Little Bun seems a bit cold or indifferent during her class, as she’s used to group lessons rather than 1-on-1. I’m still considering whether she might be better suited to group lessons where there are more games and interactions with classmates.

Finding the right tutor is challenging, and it also takes time to work with them to meet our specific needs. I really hope our current setup can last for a while.