Arts Fun! 3 - Story Drawing with Your Kid!

I call it a "story drawing", because we tell a story when we are drawing the picture :)

I'm not sure how many of you have done it, but I still remember vividly how this activity formed part of my childhood. When I was in primary school, there was this little boy sitting beside me. Whenever we had breaks in between of the lessons, he would invite me to draw a picture with him. The title can be anything set by him, a garden, a space tour in the universe, a picnic or anything that he could think of. We would take turn to draw an object on the paper, and form a story when we were drawing. It was a very fun process, and I picked up some drawing skill from him.

Last Saturday, I thought of this activity and told Chloe my idea of doing a joint drawing with her, with a story in mind. She happily accepted the challenge.

We started the story by saying it was a fine and sunny day. She drew the sun (which looked like rambutan to me, haha! ).

When it was my turn, I drew a house which I though might be too difficult for her to draw. She said that was our house, and she drew herself standing beside the house. I then drew a tree beside her drawing.

We enjoyed ourselves drawing the picture together. It was fun hearing her talking from her point of view. For example she drew her brother without hair, but herself with long hair, she said her brother is a baby the hair is not grown out yet.

She requested to colour the picture. I let her choose the colours but I would give her some suggestions. I also did some enhancement over her colouring to show her how to make the drawing looked better.

 Our finished product:

She enjoyed this activity as much as I did. At night, she placed the drawing beside her bed when she was sleeping.
I hope this post does give you idea on what to do with your kid when you have the extra time. It is a very easy activity and can be completed within 30 minutes. Through the activity, you'll be able to enhance your bonding with your kid, and understand your kid better.

So, happy drawing with your kid! :)

If you like my Art Fun!, please like the Facebook page "Learn The Fun Way" for more updates.

Lastly, a very happy Chinese new year to all!

Development age: 4 years 1 month
(every kid learns on his or her own pace, this is just a milestone of my girl as a guideline)

List of my Art Fun!:
1) Fun with colours
2) Chinese New Year Drawing

Do also visit my A to Z fun classes.

How to make Si Wu Kuai Du (四五快读) a fun experience

If you're reading this post, I guess you probably have read about the books of Si Wu Kuai Du (四五快读) or might have even bought the set. This set of books claim to enable the kids to start reading Chinese at the age of 4 or even younger, and many parents bought the set hoping to achieve this, however many of them do not know how to start using the books.

A brief introduction of the book (in case you don't know yet :P)
There are 7 books in a set. Kids learn simple and basic characters like 大(big)， 小(small)， 人(human)， 头(head)， 哭(cry)， 笑(smile) in the first lesson. These words are easy to explain to the younger kids, and they form the basic of many sentences used in our daily life.
The books advance from basic words to simple nouns, terms and sentences. Example, kids learn to form short sentence in book one using the basic words they have learned:
小鸟在天上飞，小羊在地上跑。
In the above sentence, 鸟 and 羊 are easy to be remembered by the kids as kids tend to like animals, 小 and  地上 are introduced at the first two lessons, while 跑 is been used by the parents almost daily (don't you like to say 不要跑！haha!). So the word 在 might probably be new to the kid but this is one of the words that need not be explained and can be understood when you see them more often, example of other words are 的，和，是.

Kids get confidence when they are able to read the sentence, and they progress to read short stories in the books. One big success of the book is that it introduces words progressively and base on the frequency the words are commonly used.

So now that you have bought the books, how are you going to start?!

If you are teaching a primary school kid, you can probably let the kid read through the books lesson by lesson. But if you are teaching a pre-school kid, you might need to spend some time to make the lessons fun!

Let's look at what's on the first lesson:

There are 16 words been introduced in the first lesson in Book 1. On page 2, 6 nouns / adjectives been formed by using the words learned in page 1. On page 3, kid is to guess what the pictures are and their matching words. There are some explanation on how to explain the words in page 4.

My girl had learned the words in the Chinese Fun Classes where I was using the Er San Kuai Du (二三快读) which is more suitable for kids below 3 years old. So first lesson was not a problem to her. But she started to get bored when we were at lesson 3, where more words are new to her.

In order to get her interested in learning the words, I photocopied page 2 and 3 of each lesson and let her cut the words and pictures out and join them together. Kids at the age of 3 to 4 start to explore things around them including scissor, marker pen, eraser and even broom and mop. Many things which are common to us might be something interesting to them, and this is the time they improve on their motor skill.

My girl likes cutting paper very much, she is able to handle scissor very well now. If your kid is still unable to use scissor, you might consider cut the paper by yourself and let the kid do the pasting.

I let her paste the pictures on one side of the A4 paper:

She would find the matching words and paste it on the side of the picture.

There are some word cards  at the end of the books which you can cut them out to enhance your teaching. You may let the kid form sentences using those cards after the kid finished the first few lessons.

Once again I stress that the teaching and learning using this set of books should be fun and stress-free. Kids will only learn when they are interested in it, or else you are just wasting your time and money.

Some points on using the books:
1) Do not make your kid memorise the words, instead, you should explain each word to your kid in an interactive way. Refer here on how I make the lesson fun.
2) Relate the words to something the kid gets to see often as and when possible. E.g. 月 which resemblances the crescent moon, while 人 resemblances a human in a walking posture.
3) Do not use the word cards like the flash cards i.e. not to flash the cards to the kids to make them remember the words. Research has shown that hard memory is just temporary and will not last long.
4) You might add in some activities to enhance the learning experience, example like what I've mentioned above, let the kid cut and paste the picture and words, or it can be drawing or colouring the words.
5) Lastly,   please refer here on guidelines on teaching young kids Chinese language.

I hope this post is useful to you and brings some light to you on how to start your fun Chinese lessons :)

Do like my Facebook page "Learn The Fun Way" if you like this article and would like to get more updates :)

Development age: 4 years 1 month
(every kid learns on his or her own pace, this is just a milestone of my girl as a guideline)

List of my Chinese Fun Classes:
0) Guideline on teaching Chinese language
1) Basic lesson 1
2) Basic lesson 2
3) Basic lesson 3 
4) Chinese Fun Class: My body

Chinese Fun Class: Lesson on Body 我的身体

For your information, I've sold away my set of 二三快读 (Er San Kuai Du i.e. Chinese Fast Reading for age 2 and 3), so I will not be posting my Chinese lessons using the materials from this set anymore. It is a good starter set for young children to pick up Chinese words, but I sold it because I have other ideas for my girl.

In this lesson, I intend to do a summary on the body parts in Chinese with her. She had learned it from the previous lessons and also from her school. I searched the Internet for relevant worksheets but I found the resources are very limited. Thus I created it for her, you may download it by clicking the picture below:

You may print the image out, cut the words and let your kid label the picture.

To start the Chinese lesson, we sang the song 早安你好 by changing the word “早” to “好” as the lesson was conducted at night.
The lyrics go like this:
“老师好（早），同学们好，我们开始上课了”

I asked her to name the body parts in Chinese. I then gave her the worksheet above, she was excited to see her favourite Barbie doll picture and asked me how to say "Barbie doll" in Chinese. she read the words one by one and pasted them on the picture.

She labeled the picture with the words that I had cut out from the worksheet above.

Her barbie doll picture labeled with the body parts in Chinese:

After completing the first worksheet, I gave her the second worksheet which is the nursery rhyme of 两只老虎 (Two Little Tigers). You may download it here:

There are 3 blanks to be filled up which have a matching picture. Cut out the words below the worksheet and let the kid paste them on the correct blanks.

The worksheet done:

We read the worksheet one time and sang the nursery rhyme. Learning Chinese words through singing nursery rhyme is really a very good way.  Kids will find it easier to recognise the words and they also find it interesting.

Lastly, she did a craft on tiger mask. The materials are as follow:

All you need are just a paper plate, two rubber bands, some cut out of the stripes and ears.

She pasted the stripes on the paper plate:

 We decided not to paste the ears so it is as described by the nursery rhyme “一只没有耳朵”， haha!

 The mask done and she quickly put it on to scare her younger brother.

 We had fun with the mask and sang the nursery rhyme a few times.

Note: Although this post is written mainly in English, the lesson was conducted in Chinese and she was speaking only Chinese during the lesson. I against speaking a mixture of more than one language in a sentence.

If you like my Chinese Fun Class, please like the Facebook page "learn the fun way" for more updates.
Do refer to the labels on the right hand side for other English fun classes.

Development age: 3 years 10 months
(every kid learns on his or her own pace, this is just a milestone of my girl as a guideline)

List of my Chinese Fun Classes:
1) Basic lesson 1
2) Basic lesson 2
3) Basic lesson 3

My Fun Class: A - Z Upper and lower case letters

There are quite many readers asking me for the upper and lower case A - Z letters which I printed on an A4 size paper for my girl to use it with the A - Z pictures. If you're interested to get one you may download it from the link here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0Jop-U2bqVAV2hQaWlJbDgzaWc/edit?usp=sharing

A sample page of the document used:

You may let your kid colour or trace the letter. After the kid is introduced with the letter, let the kid paste the pictures of objects spelled after the letter. The pictures can be downloaded here.

Do refer to my A to Z fun classes here:
1) A for Ant
2) A for Apple
3) B for Bubbles and Bear
4) C for Crocodile
5) C for Cake
6) D for Duck and Dog
7) E for Egg and Elephant
8) F for Frog
9) F for Fish
10) G for Goat
11) H for Horse
12) H for House
13) I for Insect
14) I for Indian
15) J for Jelly
16) J for Jack-in-the-box
17) K for Kettle
18) K for Kangaroo
19) L for lollipop
20) L for Leaf
21) M for Monkey
22) M for Mummy
23) N for Necklace
24) N for Net
25) O for Octopus
26) O for Orange
27) P for Potato
28) P for Pig
29) Q for Queen
30) Q for Quilt
31) R for Rabbit
32) R for Rainbow
33) S for Snake
34) S for Star
35) T for Tiger
36) T for Tortoise
37) U for Up and Under
38) U for Umbrella
39) V for Vegetable
40) V for Vase

41) W for Worm

42) W for Whale

43) X is a Cross

44) X for X-ray

45) Y for Yolk

46) Y for Yacht

47) Z for Zebra

48) Z for Zoo

Chinese Poem - 春晓 - 孟浩然

This is the 3rd Chinese Poems that she can recite:



When choosing the poems for her, I try to choose those easier and popular ones.

The poem in Chinese:
春眠不觉晓
处处闻啼鸟
夜来风雨声
花落知多少

The English translation I found from Internet:
In spring I sleep aware not morning is here,
From far and near, trilling songbirds I hear.
In the pitter patter of wind and rain last night,
How many blossoms fallen? Know not, I fear.

Do note that this English translation is just for your reference. So far, most of the translations I found from the Internet are just translating the words without really giving the meaning of the poem, so I do not encourage teaching your child the English translation.

Other Chinese poems that your kid might like:

1. 静夜思 - 李白
2. 相思- 王维

Development age: 3 years 10 months
(every kid learns on his or her own pace, this is just a milestone of my girl as a guideline)

If you would like to get more updates on her fun learning, please like the Facebook page "Learn The Fun Way".

Art Fun! 2 - Chinese New Year Drawing / Greeting Card

As Chinese New Year is approaching, we did a drawing of plum blossom which can be used as a greeting card.

The materials are very simple, just a piece of white card, paints and a few brushes.

To start, we need to 'blow' the brunches of the plum blossom out, believe me, this is a very interesting activity for your child :)
You can use a brush to put a few drops of the colour on a white card, alternatively you can also use a straw to do this.

Chloe was blowing hard to create the brunches. Do note that the colour must be watery enough, if not it is very hard to blow the brunches out.

The brunches should look something like this:

We then need to print the plum blossom on the paper. I asked her what colour should I mix to get pink, and we referred to the first lesson on the colours combination.

She took red and white and mixed to get pink:

After getting the pink colour, I demonstrated to her how to use the index finger to print the petals of the plum blossom. It should be 5 petals in each flower but she printed it everywhere on the paper without constructing the structure, never mind, the result was still quite satisfactory.

I helped her to write the Chinese words "福到人间" on the card, which means "good fortune or blessing". She written her name at the bottom of the drawing.

 

A picture of her with her drawing that full of 'blessing', ha!

 

I pasted the  drawing on my feature wall in the living hall, it is rather small, I should have use a bigger paper :(

A closer look on the drawing:

If you like my Art Fun!, please like the Facebook page "Learn The Fun Way" for more updates.

Lastly, a very happy Chinese new year to all!

Development age: 3 years 10 months
(every kid learns on his or her own pace, this is just a milestone of my girl as a guideline)

List of my Art Fun!:
1) Fun with colours

Do also visit my A to Z fun classes.

Chinese Poem: 相思 - 王维

This is the second video of her reciting the Chinese poem.



Her pronunciation is still very heavy with English accent, but it is much better than her first video clip.

She got the poem after a few attempts, when she's in her mood, she would keep trying until she got the lines, she would also stop me from telling her the next line; but if she's not in her mood, she would tell me she doesn't like the poem, for which I would just let it go.

The poem in Chinese:
红豆生南国，春来发几枝。
愿君多采撷，此物最相思。

The translation I got from Internet for your reference:
“When those red berries come in springtime,
Flushing on your south land branches,
Take home an armful, for my sake,
As a symbol of our love.”


Points to note:
Although I've given the English translation above, you do not need to explain the poem in English to your kids when reciting the poem to them.  Reciting of poem is just like singing a nursery rhyme, the kids do not need to understand the meaning of the poem word by word, they will get to understand it when time comes by.

Other Chinese poem that your kid might like:

1. 静夜思 - 李白

 Development age: 3 years 10 months
(every kid learns on his or her own pace, this is just a milestone of my girl as a guideline)

If you would like to get more updates on her fun learning, please like the Facebook page "Learn The Fun Way".