我的身体

Hey everybody, it’s been a ludicrously long time since I last blogged! We have been amazingly busy with adjustments to our normal daily schedules and setting up of Young Smarties online SHOP! It’s pretty exciting but also a lot of hiccups along the way. Our humble little shop doesn’t has any shopping cart yet. So if you find something you like, don’t be shy, do send us an email with your preferred items and details! 🙂

Did we stop learning while busy with daily schedules? Nope! We still learn every single day and the latest topic (or should we say language or subject) we are working on is Chinese. It’s not easy to learn Chinese especially in an environment where most of us speaks and read English most of the time. Even signboards, notices etc are mainly in English too. Don’t you agree? There may be some Chinese but we tend to read the English words instead. Teaching ABCs is easy, there are so many resources and materials available but not for Chinese. I had a huge headache while doing the research on Chinese materials and how to make it interesting for the children. Finally, here’s what we did.

We started off with learning about our body and facial features through the use of flashcards. We did that by flashing each word with a picture alternatively so that the children are able to “link” the word to the correct picture.

We have little writing practice too! The Chinese words introduced here are simple ones. For now I do not want to stress them with words that have too many strokes. Will do that progressively so that they won’t get turn off by Chinese. The kids begin with felt Chinese words. It takes quite a bit of time to make this as it takes an amount of work especially the cutting part. But very happy to see them enjoying the felt words. They can feel each stroke and I use these felt word cards to teach them the name of the strokes, and the stroke sequence of each character as well. Once they are done “playing” with the felt cards, they begin the actual writing on paper using marker.

After we are done with writing practice, we proceed on to colouring which, I believe, most kids will love to do. We read the instructions together on the page and the children colour the correct answers.
  

To revise on word recognition, we did a little simple multiple choice question. It’s a bit of a challenge for my toddler but my preschooler manage to get it all correct.

Too much writing can bore the kids. Over here, we have some hands on activities. The children get to match the words to the correct part of the body.

And here, we read aloud and match the correct word and image on a small booklet. Good for travelling use too! I have brought it out a few times for the kids to work on.

Last but not the least, we have crafts!!! I have 2 pages of body parts: 1 with shapes, 1 with image of the body parts. The 2 children get to choose which one they like to do. Surprisingly, my preschooler chose the shapes and my toddler chose the image. What they need to do is to cut and paste the body parts on a blank piece of paper, colour it and write the word 我 on the paper. This is good for training their motor skills.

As expected, the toddler’s work became a “mess” work. As for my preschooler, before I can get my hands on his final artwork, it is being taken over by my toddler who added some decorative designs on it and made it into a paper aeroplane.

To finish off, we have a round of Chinese songs and one of their favourite is 两只手. We had loads of fun learning Chinese!