Comparing Vietnamese curriculum - VN national books

I bought 1st grade Vietnamese language curriculum in two cities, Hanoi(North) and Saigon(South). There is supposed to be a standardized national curriculum where all students study the same things. But the books are different looking at first glance(plus I forgot I had purchased some in Hanoi) that I ended up with two sets of essentially the same material. BUT they have divergent approaches. Lessons do correspond; number 10 in one set teaches the same thing as number 10 in the other, but the Southern book is much more child friendly, with color pictures. There are no pictures in the Northern book. It really was an eye opener.

South - Part 1, Text book, Workbook and writing practice

South - Part 2

North - Text books for both parts, I would have bought matching workbooks if I had found them.

South -Lesson 28

North - Lesson 28 is on the left side, Lessons 29,30 on the right!

Back side of the South text and work books. 

This shows how cheap the books are, yet there are kids who don't go because they can't afford to buy books! 10,700d is about 50 cents for the Text, the work book is 4,000d and the writing book is 2,500d.I had thought to make copies and have her write on the copy, but the copies would have cost much more than the writing book did.

The backs also list the other available books. So for the Text books there are:
1) Vietnamese Language 1
2) Math 1
3) Nature & Society 1
4) Writing 1

Work books have:
1) Vietnamese Language 1
2) Math 1
3) Nature & Society 1
4) Morality 1
5) Drawing 1
6) Singing 1

Dictionaries - Not enough words!

I have had this particular dictionary for at least 15 years, and I have finally reached the conclusion that it's not very helpful. It's a Viet-English, English-Viet book, but I've found that having both directions in one book makes the set of words included rather limited. Also it's copyrighted in 1975, so I'm sure there are new terms that are missing. I bought a Viet-English only book from Vinabook.com, and it is supposed to have 175,000 word/phrases. In truth, the way Vietnamese is used a lot of concepts are actually expressed using 2 words, so the V-E/E-V dictionary has definitions for the individual words but not so many phrases. I had to start using the V-E book recently because there were words in our 1st grade Vietnamese curriculum that I could not find in the other dictionary. 1st grade words! Not in the dictionary! Now I know I need to get an updated English-Vietnamese dictionary too.

Vietnamese 1st grade curriculum

During this most recent trip to Vietnam, I bought more books. Some are the language curriculum books for 1st grade. I bought some in Hanoi, then bought some in Saigon.

This is 1st grade text book, part one. There is another set of books which look a lot like these, but with pinkish purple covers. The two sets cover one years worth of material. These are the ones from Saigon, they are much more child friendly with color pictures and lessons broken up into smaller segments.

This is the workbook. It has some matching exercises and some writing.

This is a writing practice book. It has practice pages that correspond with the lessons in the book.

This is a book of stories that goes with the 1st grade curriculum. I'm having some difficulty reading them, I think they're read alouds with some questions to be asked of the students.

Vietnamese preschool curriculum

So while I was in vietnam I bought a bunch of books. These are the workbooks. They were all very cute, and very cheap, only about 6,000d (basically ~37 cents). I didn't really look that closely while I was in the bookstore, so it ended up that a lot are duplicate material. 

This is a series of books that have a story, pictures to color and letters to practice. The 3-4 year old books practice strokes, while the older ages 4-5 and 5-6 practice letters.

Inside Sample from 3-4 yo book

If you notice, the font used for the story is the same cursive that is taught for writing, so the kids are practicing reading cursive at the same time they learn to write.

3-4 Year Old books

4-5 year old books

5-6 year old books

These two are actually the same material, just presented by different publishers.

Inside of the two books from different publishers.

Vietnamese Videos and piracy

I found a set of Vietnamese videos teaching the alphabet in cute songs. There are 2 videos covering A to R, and there should be one more for the remainder of the alphabet. I emailed the makers of the video set to ask about the last video. Their response was that there was so much copying of their videos that they were busy suing the stores and didn't have time or money to invest in new productions. Apparently the stores were copying and selling the videos in bulk. There were some things I didn't like about the videos in that they were not exclusively in Vietnamese, but they would throw English translations of the songs in some segments. Not only that, their English translations were not the best translations. I would rather teach one language well, than have two mixed up languages. But the amount of learning video is very limited, I haven't even seen any made in Vietnam. I guess it's not as common for kids to learn from videos as it is here in the US.