四五快读 – Extended Learning & Lesson 2
As we embarked on the literature based learning method since the beginning of the year, I’ve incorporate the lit-based learning method into our chinese home learning as well. Strongly believe it’s through literature based learning that the children would enjoy the learning process more especially so for chinese.
Being a busy mom, my lesson planning has been tweaked to shorten my preparation process in which that I’ve minimize the need to produce handmade learning aids and thought of more games/activities to intrigue and excite the kids. I’ve worked in more time for the children to raise questions and we do more discussions (chit chatting really!). We spent a considerable amount of time on reading aloud and I’ve noticed that the children would pull out the storybooks during pockets of free time and browse through them on their own. Most times they would ask me to re-read the entire story again and they’d have new questions raised along the way. This has been our home learning style thus far since the beginning of the year.
We continued with the 四五快读 program however, we revisited the chinese words 大, 小, 天, 月, of lesson 1 through other activities that was totally new. We also started learning a few new words from lesson 2, 水, 云, 太阳. I figured that just by learning through recognition of words alone can get rather dull after a while, and have since gathered all the chinese resources I have to put up a lesson that’s learning through play to make it less dry for the kids.
Here’s a short clip of the various activities we’ve done; mainly read aloud and word cards activities.
Over and above the activities you see in the video, here are some other resources I’ve used throughout our Chinese home learning.
We sang songs about the Moon as we learned the word 月 through this children’s rhyme/songs Book (with an audio CD attached). This resource can be found in the Popular Bookstores, it comes in a series of about 8 books. Each book containing an audio CD. It’s rather affordable and it’s a taiwan production.
The books we’ve used for our learning of the words 大, 小, 云, 天, 太阳 were mainly from this series (see picture below). We totally love this range of books about the character 莎娜. Not only the illustrations are beautiful, the stories appeal greatly to my children as they are fun and spark imagination and the kids seem to be able to relate to the stories quite well.
好饿的小白熊, tells of a fluffy white “bear” who was really hungry and couldn’t move to get home. The only way for him to get home is to eat clouds. In order to help the bear to get home, 莎娜 used a net to catch some clouds for the hungry bear. As the bear ate the cloud he started floating towards the sky. As he continues eating the clouds he grew so huge that he turns into a dark cloud and began raining…
In this book, the children get to learn about science and the works of nature. Above which, they were made to recognize the words 大, 云, 天. We had loads of fun discussing about how the clouds changed and how dark clouds were formed and how the rain came about. 
We did a revision on what is 乌云, and 白云 looking at the pictures below.
Did some nursery rhyme singing using these. I like this resource as it indicates what tune to sing those nursery rhymes in, extremely convenient for us busy parents!
In this book 神奇的蓝色水桶, we hop right into the imagination of 莎娜’s and it was pure fun to just imagine how it would have been like when a tiny bucket became a huge pool and eventually an ocean with whales within it.
The words we learned through reading this book were 大, 小, 水, 太阳. Likewise, we sang a nursery rhyme about 大, 小, using this book.
Home learning for chinese can be done simply. The important thing is to be consistent in doing the lessons and speaking in mandarin more often that will set the environment for the child to be comfortable in the language and not fear it. If time is really short, just do read aloud and speak in mandarin more often 
*****************************************************************
四五快读 – Book 1 Lesson 2
If you have benefitted from the free printables (developed in-house by MyPlayschool.net) of the 四五快读 - Book 1 Lesson 1 (click here for the printable), then you are now able to purchase a PDF version of Book 1 Lesson 2 printables. 四五快读 Lesson 2′s, 12 pages printables comprise of word cards, picture that are relevant to the word cards, rhymes and games that you could easily execute while learning with your child.
Book 1 Lesson 2 PDF Printables S$10.00
