Yep - national curriculum changed for grades 3/4 so we'll all be getting new books
For what it's worth, I've been teaching with Cheonjae for 2+ years now, and I opted to switch at both my schools. I'm not sure what your situation is at all, so I don't know what to recommend. I'll just tell you the opinions that I and my co-teachers had, and what we decided to do. Apologies in advance for what will undoubtedly become an excessively lengthy post ...
CheonjaeSo Cheonjae has some great advantages. Animations and songs the little ones liked, nice graphics, some of the textbook games are pretty good. Plus lots of extra materials / alternative things to teach. Having to plan 16 different lessons a week, this stuff can be a big time saver, and I like a lot of what the publisher offers. So I don't think Cheonjae is necessarily a bad choice. BUT.
I had some serious problems with these books. Because my (main) school is in a low-income neighbourhood, my students don't attend hagwons. This means that for most of them, these textbooks make up the
entirety of the English curriculum they're being taught, and because of that, the holes in Cheonjae's material are very evident to me. If you have privileged kids who have a good grasp of English anyways, then these things may matter less. But for the sake of your non-hagwon going kids, take them into consideration.
I'll run through the most major issues I had with Cheonjae here:
1 - Phonics and letters are majorly insufficient. How a 9-year-old can be expected to learn the entire alphabet in only 4 classes is unfathomable to me. (That problem got
even worse with the new books, by the way. The kids are now expected to learn the entire alphabet in a total 120 minutes, and by Grade 3 Lesson 2 are supposed to be writing words! I couldn't learn Hangeul that fast as a fully grown adult.)
2 - Cheonjae Grades 3/4 doesn't teach students to write expressions. Kids will spend two classes learning "Let's play ~~", and then the book never shows them how to write actually "Let's play". Just the accompanying nouns.
3 - Cheonjae Grade 4 doesn't teach sight words. An off-shoot of the above problem, the kids never actually learn to write "the", "I", "he", "she", "it", "a", etc. This is a seriously big failing, because the first chapter of Cheonjae Grade 5 they're expected to be reading paragraphs. If you haven't taught them phonics properly, and you haven't taught them sight words, when are they going to learn how to read "the"?! This meant a lot of supplemental work for me.
4 - Cheonjae teaches numbers in an unbelievably stupid way. Grade 4 have learned up to 20, and then in 5th grade, they're suddenly expected to learn 21-50,000 in one chapter. Add on the fact that the Korean counting system is based on 4 zero denominations instead of the western 3 zero denominations, and you have a nightmare on your hands. I've been teaching up to 50 to my 4th graders to try and minimize this problem in later grades, but it makes a lot of the textbook for those chapters totally useless.
5 - There is a giant level leap between the Grade 4 and the Grade 5 textbooks. To prep my kids for this, I spend a lot of time teaching my fourth graders things that aren't in the textbook, but that I know they'll be expected to magically know come fifth grade. It's just poorly thought out curriculum pacing. I wanted a book that seemed to better prep 4th graders for the next level.
6 - Cheonjae doesn't teach any grammar principles. I'm not big on teaching little kids a lot of grammar, but at some point you need to explain that we say "I am ~", "You are ~", and "He is ~". Or "I do~" and "She does ~". None of the new books seem to do this either, though, so I guess I'll call this point a wash. I've already made all the grammar worksheets I could need now, anyways.
So these were the main things I was looking to avoid in the new books.
I'm at two different schools, and the students are in very different situations, so we ended up choosing two different books.
YBM 최For my main school (where I teach
very low level kids) we opted for the 최 YBM books (specifying author since YBM has two book options this year). These books were clearly designed with low level kids in mind, and so it was a clear winner for my students' situation.
There's a lot of phonics learning in the beginning, and even better, the books have only 12 chapters, with 6 mini chapters devoted to phonics throughout the year in both grade 3 and 4.
These YBM books also do a much better job with numbers (teaching 4th graders up to 59 by using the time), sight words, and expression writing in general. Seems like it will be able to bridge the gap to fifth grade much better than Cheonjae does.
The books also have a lot of projects, which are great for very low level kids. Projects give the kids a chance to construct their own sentences, and presentations get them accustomed to using the language in public. High level kids may not benefit as much, but for low level kids it's a great idea.
I would note that there's no textbook game in the first lesson of these books. That makes sense to me, since low level kids need to spend a good chunk of the first class learning new vocab and expressions, and we usually don't have time for a game. Maybe ten minutes for bingo or slap the card, at most. I make my own games anyways, though, so I didn't care about that. But that may be off-putting for some teachers.
Another thing to note is that there weren't a ton of cards in the back of the book. I like to use those for a lot of my games (and homework assignments), so I was unhappy with that. But that seemed generally true across all the books.
Dong-a and YBM 김For my other school (average to high level kids), we narrowed it down to 김 YBM and Dong-a. The 최 YBM books we picked for my other school were too easy, and we wrote off Cheonjae almost immediately when we saw that they hadn't fixed a lot of last year's problems. Daekyo honestly just looks like crap to me.
I would have picked YBM 김 for my big school, but I have coteachers there and they liked Dong-a
. Really the difference was negligible, so I relented. The books are thematically based, have some fun looking games, and some nice artwork. So I get the attraction.
Personally, I liked the new YBM 김, because I think the more middle-level students could really benefit from the slower letter introductions (3 letters per lesson), and the pacing seems good. Teaches numbers, sight words and expression writing better than Cheonjae does as well. Again, insufficient cards.
I had some small issues with Dong-a. If I'm not mixing it up, I remember it taught writing with dog and DOG. I get that they just want to teach how to write capital letters, but it is a constant battle getting my kids to understand when to use them properly, so I'd rather not introduce them in a way they're not used grammatically. Also some stupid decisions like naming a character "Cindy" in the 3rd grade book, in the same chapter the kids are learning the hard "c" sound. Just liable to confuse them, and will probably force us to answer questions about confusing pronunciation rules in the first week of English class.
But okay, those are just little annoyances. Overall nothing caught my eye as a big problem.
It would be really helpful to have seen the teacher's manuals, CDs, and 5th/6th grade books. But based on the info we had, I'm fairly happy with the decisions we made.
Hope that gave you some things to discuss with your coteacher.
