The Natural Words
During my instructor days in Shichida, I would always try to link up the activities and make it into a storyline. I super love using my creative juices and seeing the smiles on the children's faces. Old habits die hard. Now, I will often do that for my kids as well. It is so much more fun to do so and everything becomes play and not focused through route learning. In the beginning, I just envy my friends in Singapore who will just send their kids for enrichment, especially for our Mother Tongue Language!! It is really tough teaching it in an interesting way unlike for English as I find limited online resources. There are also no Popular bookstores here... my favourite bookstore as I can find all my books, stationery and arty stuff to do with the kids.So... tada! Racking brains time for a storyline... hee... I do it best with water and sand.
In the beginning, I started with the first 100 common words and did flashcards of these words, but when I reached about 20 words, I felt that there was no point memorising these words.. it is all about application. And we had never attended any Chinese enrichment classes, so I didn't how to start as I didn't have the experience. After a while, I decided to go for themes... which is easiest... I started with the body parts first.. this is my second topic, Nature
1) First I introduced words by making flashcards. Also, these words are very simple, with 3-4 strokes, which makes it easy for writing.
2) I thought of some games related to the words throughout the week. I just think on the spot. Sometimes, they can be quite feeble attempts, heheheh.. as I struggle to think of how to make a certain word tangible. I will try to use things from the house as I dislike clutter.. this is the words 火 which means fire. I cut it out using magnetic paper so it will be on a small white board. Immanuel will try to make the word (place the strokes properly). I will discuss with him what fire is used for... he will pick the activities like cooking, keeping warm and understood activities like bathing and playing with sand does not require fire. I will also state that fire can be dangerous. I will try to say all these in Chinese.
Next is the word 山. I asked him to use playdoh to make a mountain. And then since I also had home made (I will link up to a post on how to make it in future) red playdoh, so I asked him to make it red on top so it will be a 火山.. volcano. It turned out like this....
and hub came back at this time. He widened his eyes and asked me what it was. I told him.
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He laughed horrendously.
3) Then is the practical writing part. I have started writing strokes with him so he will understand how words are formed. Then, I also taught him before which strokes usually come first. He actually enjoys writing Chinese characters and will sometimes take out the strokes book and write himself. Some of the books have numberings which he will follow. If he is unsure, he will ask me which stroke should come first.
I do the same for other words. Now, How I taught the word 河..
It has become a difficult stage when I m alone with the kids for this 1 hr before hb is back. I had to think of games that will engage Immanuel and Reiko as both would want me to do THEIR activitiy. For example, Immanuel will want me to read a English book while Reiko will scream to read her Chinese book. So for my idea, I put water with blue food colouring and placed the laminated chinese word in and gathered some plastic animals. Using chopsticks, Immanuel and Reiko can save the animals, put on boat ( using a cut plastic milk bottle), and it became a Noah's Ark game (which I can further expand on for bible stories in future, ahha) , then they played with colour change by introducing another coloured water..
I used the finished bottle and the dropper for this colour change activity. You can also get small plastic pipettes from Daiso in Singapore. To me, most things should be already from the house. No need to get extra stuff..
Last of all, random scooping! I have many milk powder scoops that they used for this. It became a finger training game for Reiko as well and they love to play with water. Tada! I am saved for that 1 hour. At night, when hb is back, I can do writing with Immanuel 水 and 河while he plays with Reiko. (Just a note: Old milk powder scoops are especially useful and we usually bring 2 to the beach for sand scooping. After using them, we could easily discard.)
Immanuel likes puzzles, so I let him do this puzzle at the end of a few days after we did a few practical activities. This has words that he learned for the last few days. Underneath the words are small pics of the objects.
I will have to rack my brains for other topics... hehe... For me, I always believe in having fun and having a small dose of teaching each day. What is childhood like without play?
