Craft fun: Elephant letter & handprint craft

We did two crafts today for 'E for elephant', and both involved much painting.The first is a letter E craft from No Time For Flashcards. EV painted the letter, ear and trunk black, before we pasted all the pieces together.

The second is a handprint elephant from Crafty Crafted Studio. EV was extremely amused when I painted her whole hand black, and then printed it on paper. She giggled with glee when I painted the side of her palm white, and printed it as the elephant's ear.

She definitely loves getting her hands dirty, so looks like there will be more hand printing for her in future.

Chinese at home - EV @ 2 years

I started exposing EV to Chinese from when she was only a month old (you can read more about it here), and if you read 'EV's milestones' in the sidebar, you'll see that the efforts have paid off. Lately, EV is recognising even more Chinese characters, and understanding their meanings too. Here's a video of EV pointing out characters from a wall chart when she was two years one month old.

I wanted to share my Chinese journey with EV. Having made it a point to read to her Chinese books since she was young, I always made sure that the books I chose were fun and relaxing. I read her tongue twisters, rhymes and poems, even Tang poems, and tried to make it lighthearted during our nightly reading sessions. And, I always read the Chinese books before English ones. Then when she was one and a half years old, I started pointing out simple characters to her like 一, 二, 三, 山, 天 and so on, which are relatively easy to remember. I focused on reading to her and simply sharing the beauty of the language with her. Here are some of the books we used.

Around the same time, we bought sing-along DVDs of nursery rhymes and poems. These DVDs also showed the lyrics in karaoke style, which help somewhat in her character recognition. What was important though, is again exposing EV to the language in a fun way, since EV is such a music lover. 

Concurrently, we also often bring her to the wall chart of Chinese characters and show her certain characters repeatedly. The video earlier is the result of this.

Our efforts have been paying off. These DVDs are EV's favourite and she asks for them everyday. She's often in the mood for Chinese and indicates her desire by saying 'Chinese, Chinese'. Not only is she recognizing more Chinese characters, she is also picking up on her verbal Chinese. No matter that she usually responds in English. She totally understands when we speak to her in chinese, as I've been speaking to her since she was a baby. Lately, she has been vocalizing more Chinese too, even some Cantonese! (My mom speaks to her in Cantonese). 

Just this week, EV has started to sing two Chinese songs in full, thanks to the DVDs. They are 小星星 (Chinese version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) and 小老鼠上灯台 (a little mouse climbing up a lamp). I have here the lyrics of 小星星.
一闪一闪亮晶晶
满天都是小星星。
挂在天空放光明
好像天上小眼睛。
一闪一闪亮晶晶

满天都是小星星。

Here are the lyrics of 小老鼠上灯台.
小老鼠, 上灯台。
偷吃油, 下不来。
喵喵喵, 猫来啦，
叽哩咕噜滚下来

Granted, her pronunciation may not be clear all the time, but the tune and overall gist of the song is there.

Clearly, EV is very receptive to Chinese and I needed to take advantage of this to introduce more of the language to her, essentially character recognition and speaking, and maybe show her some writing of simple characters like 一, 二, 三, 人, 大 and so on. All the while keeping it fun and playful. So I needed to turn to resources with a little more structure to help me along the way.

As I had shared here, I recently bought the 我会读 Level 1 series, and have started book 1 with her. I go through the characters about two times a day, every two days (the book recommends thrice daily). She recognized 爸爸, 弟弟 and 阿姨 very quickly after going through a few times. Her receptiveness to the language is extremely encouraging and I believe I can move to book 2 soon. 

Rather than follow a formal lesson plan at the moment, I will use this series in a more relaxed environment and take EV's cues. Like during the E for Elephant session when she requested for it herself. 

EV is also requesting to be read Chinese books, even choose some from her little library herself. I got more story-based books to read to EV. I particularly chose those with story lines that reflect her life and experiences, like learning to use the potty or a story about balls, with simple story lines and sentences. I try to point out each character to her while reading, so she can follow the characters too. I also picture read and ask her to point out items I name, all in Chinese, much like what I do when reading English books.

These are the two sets of Chinese books I got for EV recently. 小猫当当 is based on a popular Japanese story character, while 乐悠悠小宝贝 hails from the Netherlands. Both feature stories that young ones can identify with, like falling sick, taking a shower or chasing after a ball. 

I was reading the 小猫当当: 小红球，等一等 story to EV and when we turned to the page about the red ball being lost in a tree full of balloons, I asked EV to imagine reaching high and trying to touch the tree. EV very adoringly said 'Cannot reach!', so we climbed up the tree, got the ball and climbed down very carefully. EV was totally immersed in this pretend play, and had fun with mummy.

Hopefully, this will set her up for her next stage of learning Chinese.

E for Earth

We did more Ee activities, with some focusing on 'earth', since Earth Day just passed. This also reiterated one of the word/image we did in the 'E for Elephant' lesson.

Alphabet

We started off going through the feely card and the A4 sheet of images. EV loved the 'Elbows Everywhere' phonics song and jived happily to it while waving her elbows. As it's easy to confuse the sounds of 'a' and 'e', I played the 'Ants on my ankles' phonics song to her again, made the sounds with exaggerated facial expressions, and wrote the two letters for her. I also wrote the word 'elephant' with her, describing the tall letters like 'l', 'h', 't' and the letters with parts that drop down like 'p', to help her recognize the word.

We had some colour chips on hand so I used them for alphabet teaching. I asked EV to create 'i' using the chips, which she did by herself. After that, I made the letters 'T' and 'L' and she named them.

Colouring

I used a colouring sheet from Kidszone. Besides the images for elephant, egg, eleven and empty, it also has an area for tracing E and e. Out of curiosity, I asked EV if she wanted to trace the letters. To my surprise, she gave a positive cue. She traced the letters while I held her hand. 

Things happen when you least expect it, and that was what happened today. EV spoke a full sentence. While she was having great fun colouring the elephant, she said 'I want to colour the nose'. She coloured half the elephant's trunk.

She also coloured the 'earth'. She called it a 'ball' the moment she saw it, which got this response from me: 'Yes, the earth is round like a ball.' I explained that the earth is where we live, while showing a picture of the earth, and pointing to the sea and land. As usual, she asked me to colour with  her, and we later traced the letters E/e, and the word 'earth'.

In line with the 'earth' theme, EV also coloured a yellow flower. Halfway, she decided to test her grip ability again, this time with three crayons. I took the opportunity to get her to practice counting the crayons - 1, 2, 3.

Shapes

We also did some shape matching, which also let EV do a bit of vertical line writing practice.

Handwriting skills

I introduced circle line tracing to EV. With a little guidance from mummy, EV tracked big and small circles. Here she is proudly showing off her work.

Art

We made a earth paper collage next from DLTK. She did the gluing and pasting all by herself.

Coordination skills

EV wanted to do more pasting and cutting after the earth paper collage. So I pulled out the Kumon First Steps Workbooks for her to work at her own pace (I had cut out the activity pages from the main books earlier). I was pleasantly surprised when EV created a 'flower' with the glue stick and one of the Kumon sheets. What a great imagination!

E for Elephant

This week has been kind of topsy turvy, with AA having a bad stuffy nose, and relatives visiting from Melbourne. The letter of the week was E and we did E for Elephant. Tot Club started as usual with the greeting song, which EV clapped along with a smile. We then did the feely card, writing the number '8' together. We sang the 'Elbows Everywhere' phonics song and EV had great fun knocking elbows with mummy.  

The images for the Ee A4 sheet where elephant, eleven, eye, earth and eel, and we wrote the words for each image after they were pasted. Besides elephant, I focused also on the words 'eleven' and 'eye', getting her to repeat the spelling of each word letter by letter after me. We also did the prompting for 'elephant'. 

Art
The colouring task of the day comes from 1+1+1=1's Animal ABC printables. At one point, she tested her gripping ability by colouring with two crayons. I let her do it for a while as part of her self exploration, and when she stopped, discreetly passed her one crayon to hold. I must say, she's got a pretty good grip.

The next art piece was from Jann's class. This elephant paper craft required colouring of the ears and trunk, before pasting to a blue envelope. EV really enjoyed the process, and of course, the end product. What's touching is that EV kept saying 'Mummy colour', so this paper craft is really the fruit of both our labour.

Chinese
Recently, I bought a set of the 我会读-幼儿启蒙读物 (Wo Hui Du) Level 1 series for kids between 1-5 years old. I had gone through book 1 on 'My Family' once or twice with EV. During the session, I had the book just beside me, thinking I would go through it again if she was in the mood. EV definitely was. When EV saw it, she immediately said 'Chinese, Chinese!'. Seeing her keenness in that area, I went through that book with her, instead of doing the maths activity I had planned. The first phrase was 爸爸 and EV said it as soon as she saw the page. Despite having just seen it once or twice prior, EV clearly recognized the characters and was able to recite it from memory. It was quite a heartening experience for me. EV is showing interest in Chinese, and picking it up!

Maths
Using a numbers sheet from 1+1+1=1's Animal ABC printables, I got EV to count using buttons. We did 1 to 10 first, and also traced them. Later, she practiced her hand and coordination skills by putting the buttons back into the bottle, by pouring the buttons from the bottle cap.

Music
We sang Skidamarink, and I did the actions. EV loved it, and kept asking me to repeat. By the third time, she could follow the actions, and jive to the tune.