Learn through play - Chinese

I would suspect most parents faces the same challenge of helping their children succeed in managing both mother tongue and English in studies. However, a recent discussion with another parent has supported my view that it should still an 80/20 rule, as majority of the syllabus are still conducted in English, thus we should  lay a solid foundation in English. Still this does not rule out the fact that we should still encourage our children to improve on their 2nd language as best as they could.

Like many parents today, I face the same issue in helping my children to adopt Mandarin and learn to love the language. It is indeed a painful and brain wrecking effort trying to make this possible, and I believe that I am not alone on this journey.

Having explored several avenue, I am currently working on a few mini projects hoping to harvest some results in the coming months.

1.  At least one of the parent, in this case myself, to converse with the kids in Mandarin as frequent as  possible. (And even this needs constant self reminder)
2. Start including more Mandarin books in their leisure reading lists and bedtime stories sessions. In the beginning, more efforts are needed to translate some of the content after reading them in  Mandarin, but eventually less translation seems to be required, hopefully it's a sign of improvement for the kids.
3. Daily flashing the Chinese word list (字宝宝), or at least 3 times a week. Joel has shown     tremendous improvement in Chinese words recognition from this exercise.
4. I started building some simple word puzzles for  Joel, hopefully this should help him in     recognising some of the simple words that he has learnt. Also puzzles  should be a good avenue to allow him to learn through play.  I have enclosed a sample for any parents whom might find this useful. (Note: Care should be taken in not expanding the word table too much, as the child may feel lost or give up in the process.)

 I will continue to research and build on new materials that will help the children improve on their Mandarin, and will share them on this blog once ready.

I guess, most importantly, we need to let the children feel that they are not alone striving to improve, and we must show and work together with them adopting and loving the language. This perhaps is the most effective way to progress together.

All the best! To any parents that are in the same boat. Kampateh!