Amazing Chinese

Richard is learning Chinese with me, and I have a shortage of good Chinese books annotated with the phonetic symbols. The trouble is, once you learn to read words to a certain point, you don't need to use the phonetic symbols anymore. Most of my books are Chinese books without phonetic symbols, and only the books for children from age 7 to 10 have the phonetic symbols. These books are targeted on this particular age group of children so the subject may not be so interesting for Richard. However, I don't think the content is very important at this stage as we are trying to learn about the tones of different words, and not learning about the word itself too much.
One thing I can do to help Richard is to make a list of Chinese words that are commonly used by us. For example, greetings between people, food, numbers, time, household items, clothes, professions, transportation are the basic word groups that will be important to learn. I can also compile some conversations that are useful, such as asking direction, paying for taxi, bus and train, looking at map, buy and reading a newspaper, and ordering food. It will also be important for Richard to learn the words for emergency, and perhaps some emergency phone number in Taiwan as well. It will be fun to tell him about the culture in Taiwan, and this education is not all about learning the language, but learning about the culture as well. What do people do in Taiwan? How do we learn Chinese at school? There are so many stories behind each word, and he's beginning to recognise the drawings in the words. Chinese words never cease to amaze me: they are so interesting to look at. When you don't know how to write a word, you have to think about the sound, the shape of the thing it is describing, and words are made up by different components as well.
I am learning Chinese again: it's the Amazing Chinese school that I have opened. I am learning new words as well while Richard starts to grapple with the facinating Chinese that I've been using since I was three.