Friday, May 16, 2014

Free Kids Chinese Textbook and Worksheets -- Overseas Chinese Language and Culture Online

I think we might be done making our own material to teach our kids Chinese. We started doing that because we couldn't find anything free online. One day, however, my husband stumbled upon Overseas Chinese Language and Culture Online (中国华文教育网). It's a website specifically meant to help Chinese people out of China educate their children. Basically, that's us! It basically completely fulfills our needs. The best part about it is that it has tons and tons of free teaching materials for kids to learn Chinese.

So we will still blog about ways we teach our kids Chinese, but we probably won't spend a lot of effort making our own worksheets. No sense in re inventing the wheel!

Here is the page that has all of their teaching resources:

http://www.hwjyw.com/textbooks/downloads/zhongwen/

Notice all of the different categories of lessons they have. Click on "单课" after "《中文》教材第一册" to go to the first set of lessons

This is the first subset of lessons Each link to a lesson goes to a 4-5 page PDF of great teaching material for kids.

Here are sample pictures of what's in the second lesson (direct link to the PDF is here)




Stroke order
One of my favorite parts about these lessons is that they have little reading paragraphs. These little paragraphs mostly just include characters that are the current or the previous lesson. Our son was reading these entire paragraphs! He felt like such a big smart boy. We could hardly believe our 4 year old was reading Chinese.




These free lessons are all high quality. I would recommend downloading and saving them all now. It almost seems too good to be true, so I would download them now in case they are not available in the future! It's hundreds and hundreds of pages of lessons.

What do you think?

EDIT:

It looks like you can buy the books on Amazon! The first book seems to be available paperback for about $7 plus shipping, which isn't a bad deal. Sometimes it's easier to have the actual book instead of printing things out all the time.

Since the Chinese government makes these for overseas schools, Chinese schools would probably be the best place to find hard copies. They are hard to find elsewhere.






Monday, May 12, 2014

"How are you" Chinese Worksheet

Our oldest is going crazy practicing his characters. He probably knows around 70 of them by now. We feel like we really need to get him started reading things. If he realizes that he can actually start to read Chinese sentences and hopefully soon start to read Chinese stories, I think he will get really excited. So I made a worksheet today to help with that.

First there is a page teaching the following characters:


  • You 你
  • Good 好
  • Me 我
  • Very 很


Click on the picture to download the PDF of the "How are you" kids Chinese practice worksheet

Then there is a little fill in the blank game. I hope he figures out what is supposed to go into the empty dialog boxes and then feels satisfied that he is reading.


Click on the picture to download the PDF of the "How are you" kids Chinese practice worksheet

Hope you enjoy it!


Friday, May 9, 2014

book

http://wenku.baidu.com/view/5dfddd79168884868762d6e0.html

Six Chinese nursery rhymes and songs

While looking for Chinese nursery rhymes and songs to show our kids I realized there's a lot of terrible videos out there! Lots of them are just really really hard to understand. Hopefully me finding the good stuff for you all will help you out!

1. 两只老虎 -- Todays first video is a classic Chinese nursery rhyme. It's the same tune that is used in an English nursery rhyme so it will be familiar to you. It's called Two Tigers. This video is very good and your kids will love learning to sing it and watching it!


2. 拍手歌 -- This is the Chinese version of "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands". It's good!



3. 我的好妈妈 -- This is an original Chinese nursery song called "My good mother"



4.  祝你生日快乐 -- Your kids are sure to like this Chinese version of "Happy Birthday to You" where it's a bears birthday



5. 上山打老虎 -- This is sort of a Chinese tongue twister about counting to five and squirrels and tigers. Kids will love it!



6. 粉刷匠 -- This is a classic classic Chinese nursery rhyme! I sang this all the time growing up and sing it to my kids now




What do you think of these videos? If any stop working... let me know and I'll look to find another version that works.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

http://www.betterchinese.com/site/MFCW_Sampler_Pack.pdf

31, 32, 35, 55, 77