天空

This is way overdue. I was busy with the kids being ill, then parties and outings.... and then I was plain lazy. Anyway, we completed another theme for chinese homelearning some time back. Hmmm, quite a long time back. Haha.

To introduce to the kids the different elements in the sky, I did up some sort of a weather chart.

Everyday (that was the idea, at least), we would look at the sky once in the day, and once at night. The kids (Mandy actually) would stick what they can see (or feel, e.g. wind) in the sky on the correct area. Luckily, it rained quite often then, so Mandy had many chances to learn the words associated with rain.

Even now, she would sometimes look out of the window and say "Uh oh, 有乌云. Going to rain already." It's still mixed with english but at least she's taking the initiative to speak some mandarin!

We went through a book called 美丽的天空 from the library. It's like a chinese reader book. From there, and from the 四五快读 word cards, Mandy learnt a lot of new chinese words.

(By the way, I teach according to order of words in 四五快读 because I find that the kids must first know the sound of say, mountain, in chinese, is shan1, before they can recognise the word 山. I mean, they still can memorise and learn sound and meaning in the end but I prefer the whole process of word learning to be more meaningful so the kids would be more motivated. Easier to teach on my part too. So I teach words according to themes now. Very very slow but I'm quite happy with what little she knows.)

Now, she can match the words to the pictures easily.

We also learnt a new song and she could fill in the blanks of the song very well too.

We did a sky mobile too.

As of now, she can read the following sentences, with minimal assistance.

1. 我爱爸爸, 妈妈    

2. 山上有花

3. 空中有白云       

4. 天上有星星

5. 山下有水     

6. 地上有火

7. 天亮了    

8. 山上风太大    

9. 我爱笑

10. 天天下雨

11. 看, 太阳好亮

12. 妈妈好美丽

13. 妈妈爱小星星

And she's pretty interested in mandarin now! I just hope she'll try to speak more. But then I always forget to speak to them in mandarin too. Oops.