Chinese Cartoon 巧虎 Smart Tiger on Youtube

About a year ago, we were looking for Chinese cartoons to show our kids. I was in China and I bought some VCDs of some cartoons, and I downloaded a bunch more unto a flashdrive. We let our kids watch them sometime, but we never really found a cartoon that I absolutely loved and thought was good for our kids to watch. Sometimes we let them watch 喜洋洋, a famous cartoon about wolves and lambs. But we think it's too violent, and they talk too fast for our kids to really understand. It's probably better for older kids around age 7 or 8. Our kids were too young.

Smart Tiger (巧虎) is a really good cartoon that we tried to let our kids watch but never did in the past. We tried web sites like youku and always ran into an error message that said we weren't allowed to watch the video because or regional restrictions. Maybe we didnt' realize it or maybe it's new, but it turns out you can watch them on youtube! There are several different channels that have tons of episodes of 巧虎. You can just subscribe to the channel and then it's always easy to find all the episodes on your own youtube page. We have a Roku, so we just open up the youtube app on our TV and then go to the subscription and then our kids can watch Chinese cartoons on the TV very easy.

Search for it on youtube and you will find lots of playlists. Here is one:

I think 巧虎 is a great cartoon for 2 - 4 year olds. It's educational, they talk at an appropriate speed, it's fun, colorful, not too complicated, but still has interesting stories every episode. I don't think your kids will get bored watching it.

Do you like 巧虎? Leave a comment!

And if this video or the 巧虎 channel ever stops working or gets taken down, please leave a comment and let me know! I will try to find a new 巧虎 channel to post here.

Chinese Character Practice Sheet: Animals Part II- Sea Animals

My oldest son E would always ask me what my favorite animal is. Once I said that I didn't have a favorite animal. Then my middle son M asked why, and E replied for me: " Because mommy is not a kid any more, so she doesn't have a favorite animal."  Well, I guess that's true. I don't have a favorite animal. But because E loves turtle so much, I get so excited whenever I see turtles anywhere, and I always think of E. My husband and I went to New Orleans for a vacation once and we happened to saw Mardi Gras parade. I snagged a red turtle for E and that was ecstatic. I still remember seeing E's happy face when he saw the red turtle I brought home for him. 

Since E loves turtle so much, I had to make a worksheet with turtle in it. I think E will really enjoy learning how to write turtle in Chinese. Hope your kids love this worksheet as well!

Click on the picture to download the PDF. Chinese Character Practice Sheet- Animal Part II- Sea Animals

Five elements Chinese Character Worksheet and Matching Game

We just got a laser printer because we didn't want to keep spending crazy amounts of money on ink. We got a good deal on it, and now we don't feel guilty about printing out lots of stuff. This means that now we're really excited to print out worksheets for our kids to work with, so today I celebrated by making another worksheet!

This worksheet is themed after the five major elements: 

• Water 水
• Fire 火
• Sky 天
• Earth 地
• Wind 风 

Earth is the only one that's kind of hard for kids to understand. 地 has a lot of meanings and isn't very easy to translate. But it's a common character so we think it's good to learn soon anyway. Actually they are all common chinese characters.

This worksheet has two parts. The first part is a traditional worksheet with stroke order and spots to practice writing.

Click on the picture to download the PDF of this Chinese character worksheet for 水, 火, 天, 地, and 风

The next page is a matching game!

Click on the picture to download the PDF of this Chinese character matching game for 水, 火, 天, 地, and 风

We let our son do them today, and it was a big hit! He loved the matching game and he really started to learn those five characters. These worksheets are making for great quiet time activities.

His worksheet is a bit different because I hadn't added stroke order to it yet

Hope you like it!

Chinese children's videos -- set #1 (6 short videos / songs)

We give our kids the iPad to play with more than we'd like to admit. Sometimes they're doing great things like learning Chinese characters, and other times they're just playing mindless games. Both are good things in moderation, I suppose. Sometimes we just start youtube and they watch video after video. We've never really turned on Chinese videos for them to watch, but there's actually tons of stuff out there. Here's 6 videos that we watched recently which I thought were all pretty good.


1. Five witches -- a fun song and cartoon, very well done. I like that it's not the cheesy animation you see all over Chinese videos


2. 三轮车跑得快 -- A very silly song that repeats itself a lot and is easy to understand (makes it great for kids!)


3. The Chinese Number Song -- a very advanced song. This little girl sings pretty quickly! If your kids listen to it a lot and start to understand it, you can feel happy their Chinese is awesome. Fun animation.




4. My head -- a very basic animation, good for younger audiences. Teaches parts of the head. Silly animation makes it fun and it repeats a ton for good learning.



5. Count to 30 in Chinese -- at first it seems mind numbingly boring, but kids like to count. Plus it has the characters and numbers so that's good.


6. Name and Age -- the most basic video of this post, just a clown and dinosaur asking each other what their name and age is.




Hope your kids like some of these videos!

Education.com chinese character worksheets

I don't know much about education.com, but when I did some googling looking for some chinese character worksheets for my kids to play with, I found a set of worksheets that were pretty good! Below is a screenshot of one of the characters of the worksheet. Clicking on it will take you to the education.com website where you can download the PDF file of the worksheets.

Click on the picture or click here to go to the education.com site where you can hit the "download all" button to download the worksheets. It will ask you to create a free account and then you can download a PDF of the worksheets. Alternatively, here is the link I got when I created an account, hopefully it will still work in the future for anyone who wants a direct link to the PDF without having to log in and create an account.

This set has 11 pages of worksheets with the following characters:

• Elephant 象
• Home 家
• Vehicle 车
• Boat 舟
• Good 好
• Woman 女
• Fish 鱼
• Big 大
• Life 生
• Water 水
• Door 门

Overall, it's a great little free set of worksheets that I think my kids will have fun working on today. Nice big characters, plenty of room to practice, easy to download and print out. There's pictures, too, which are essential for kids. Glad I found it, hope you like them too!