First Chinese Class For The 4 Year Old

5 Feb was enrolment day at Werribee Chinese School.

This year, I had to queue twice, once for New Enrolments and once for Current Students.

We enrolled our 4 yo for the first time, but not without some misgivings.

A school mum whose daughter has been attending the school along with Beth since kinder days advised me to wait a year before enrolling Miss J. Her opinion is that at 4, she's too young to understand what's going on, especially if she can't read/write yet. She says Oz is different from China and SG, where the teachers are strict in insisting that even very young children sit still and pay attention when a lesson is going on. In Oz, she says, kids get away with distracting behaviour and inattention and the teachers are either not fussed or don't want to offend the parents.

So when I spoke with one of the teachers at the school, my first question was is 4 yo too young an age to start Chinese school?

The reply: "All kids start off not knowing how to read/write."

Duh.

When I ventured further to ask what happens if I enrol for the full year but have to take my child out halfway (say after Term 1) because she can't cope, the reply was "It's too bad. You forfeit the remainder of the terms."

Such is the customer friendliness of the Chinese. An Aussie would have couched it in more polite and sympathetic terms.

So I opted to enrol Miss J for one term.

Then came another revelation: Miss J does not qualify for government funding as she is not yet of school age, which is only reckoned from Prep onwards.

So her yearly fees are higher than Beth's: $415 (textbooks included) vs. $295 (ditto).

In all, Miss J's Term 1 fees came to $145, including textbooks.

The next challenge was settling her into her classroom.

We're thankful Miss J had her good friend T with her.

Our families have much in common. T's parents are also SG migrants. T's older brother and Beth are classmates this year (they were classmates as well in Prep and Year 1), so our families have been on friendly terms for a number of years. Miss J gets on particularly well with T. They are both second-borns, extroverted, quick, confident and unafraid.

With T by her side providing a level of comfort and security, Miss J settled in very quickly and stopped asking Mummy to sit with her.

From our positions at the back of the class, it became clear that neither girl could follow what the teacher was saying: she spoke only in Mandarin, with an occasional lapse into Cantonese for the benefit of the Cantonese-speaking student in the front row.

So it fell to me to help them find the correct book, turn to the correct page, translate what the teacher was saying into English etc.

After an introduction to "a o e" in the four intonations, the teacher decided to test each student's understanding. We thought Miss J would surely not be able to understand what was going on, but when the teacher pointed to the board, Miss J correctly answered "a o e".

The teacher beamed, and so did we.

What a moment!

This afternoon, I got out her Chinese books and Miss J insisted on doing additional writing even though she had already finished her homework in class. So she wrote a few extra lines of "a o e" and “一“.

We also read through the names she had learned in class: 爸爸，妈妈，宝宝，婷婷，嘟嘟.

Jie Jie was fascinated enough to lean over to find out what her sister's textbooks contained and to see how much of it was familiar.

Perhaps with both of them feeding off and inspiring each other, they will help each other excel.

And Jie Jie won't feel like she's the only one who's being forced to study Chinese.