Learning Chinese

Teaching Chinese is never an easy task for parents who speak English at home with their children. With the help of these tools, I manage to turn the phrase: “I don’t like Chinese.” To “Mummy, I want to learn Chinese today.”

This set of Chinese books has the same concept as “Peter and Jane” where words are being repeated to enhance the vocabulary. The books come with flash cards and an optional CD (good for parents who do not know Chinese).

These books are categorized into several series:

First 100 words – 8 books

Second 100 words – 8 books

Third 100 words – 4 books

Forth 100 words – 4 books

Fifth 100 words – 2 books

Sixth 100 words – 2 books

Seventh 100 words – 2 books

Eighth 100 words – 2 books

What I normally do is to go through the books once with my son and teach him the new words using “han yu pin yin” (pronunciation of the word using English alphabets). Then, I would have him read to me again covering the “han yu pin yin”. What I notice in many children is the ability to memorize words. They can read to you the whole page without even looking at the book! When that happened, we know that they can’t recognize words.

So, the flash cards come in handy to help or test the children to recognize words. There are several fun ways to use the flash cards. All we need is a little creativity to turn learning into games.

Check out fun ways to use flash cards in my upcoming posts.

Form Words With Alphabets

Do you remember how I taught my son spelling? Here’s another way to teach spelling in a fun way.

All you need is some alphabets printed out on paper.

What I did was to put all the alphabets in the middle of the table and started the activity by asking my children to spell their own names. Boy, were they excited. They started picking the alphabets that made up their names and arrange them.

The activity can be continued with other words. One thing I observed was that the attention span of children is short and thus, the activity cannot be too long.

A short session where children can fully concentrate and benefit is always better than a long session where children are bored and cannot absorb. Let our children learn without stress, without pressure.

The Participative Guessing Game

Now, this is fun, at least to my children. They enjoyed the session tremendously. One day, I asked all three of them to sit down in a circle and told them that we were going to play the guessing game. I told them that we would guess an animal by the description of the animal and the five of us (the three kids, me and my maid) would take turns asking a question and whoever knows how to answer would have to raise their hands.


Examples of questions asked were:

1) What animal has a mane around its face?
2) What animal comes out at night to hunt for food and goes hoot, hoot?
3) What animal has a big round stomach and a big mouth?


The game went on with the children each taking turns to ask questions. Karl and Wayne have no problem asking a question. I was amazed by Nyn who is a little more than 2 years old to be able to ask a question.

Here go the two questions asked by my little daughter:

1) What goes oo, oo, ah, ah? (jumping around and moving her arms up and down)
2) What do like this? (sticking out her tongue)

There is a lot of thinking involved in this game. You have to guess an animal by listening to the description and you have to know about an animal to be able to post a question.

The fun part which my children enjoyed is the opportunity for them to participate both in answering and asking of questions whereas the fun part for me is that I get to see my children enjoy while they learn how to participate and to shed away their shyness.