M is for Mandarin

My boys have started Mandarin school on the weekends. Why you may ask? My husband is Chinese and speaks Cantonese. I have also learned how to speak a bit of Cantonese. (Yes, funny pictures….a white girl speaking Cantonese!) We had a long conversation with my in-laws and decided that Mandarin would be a much better language to learn for several reasons. One being that it is spoken by so many more Chinese around the world than Cantonese is. In order to help all of us out, this is what we worked on this week! We used the big sized file folders and created flashcards if you will. These could definitely be customized to suit whatever language your family is learning!

Numbers 0-10

Colours

Body parts

Common Greetings

        

R is for Rainbow and Robot

Learning about colours is so much fun!

My youngest started off the week by painting with colors, making a rainbow out of his bear counters and matching the letters that spelt the word “rainbow.”

He then had to put these rainbows in order from smallest to biggest. This is actually a little challenging for him!

    

We found rainbows that were created when the sun was shining into our windows! This facilitated our discussions about prisms and how it works!

“Roll a Rainbow” was a popular game this week! The kids love to see who can build a rainbow in the fewest number of rolls!

My youngest loved graphing rainbows with these colorful clothespins from Superstore! While we were at it, we coloured a rainbow as well!

    

R is also for Robot!! We found these at www.1plus1plus1equal1.blogspot.com. We love her preschool packs!!!

We had a picnic outside and had rainbow pasta found at the Amaranth (organic health food store!)

My oldest and I had fun making “rainbow cookies.” Use your favourite recipes for chocolate chip cookies and just substitute M and M’s for the chocolate chips!

 

Eating the yummy cookies! Silly boys!

My youngest making his letter book. Here he glued on pieces of ribbon.

My youngest made a colour book. He is so proud of his creation!

    

Our final project this week was our rainbow lap books! We sat down for a couple hours and the kids went wild with glitter and glue. It was so much fun to see their creativity!! (FYI: if you do not enjoy cleaning up glitter for the next week….I don’t think this craft is for you!!!)

 

My youngest son’s lapbook….

Here is the image closed and opened. You can open the door and see his animals!

When you open the lapbook up it shows his colour wheel and some tracing activities as well as the story of Noah’s arc. We made popsicle stick figure to enhance our Noah’s arc story time! He also painted a rainbow to add to his book. We added his extra learning pages into the middle in order to keep a portfolio of the work he did this week.

    Inside his lapbook we also added his colour book. This idea was found on Erica’s site. My son loved the ribbons he added onto the book!

   My oldest son’s lapbook…

We included the ROYGBIV chart as well as the colour wheel into his lapbook.

 

 

         

Books that we read and enjoyed this week….

 

The video’s we watched were…

My kids had fun with this video!

Stay tuned for a post on Mandarin file folder flashcards as my kids are learning this language!!

(You can take a look at my other posts for the rainbow cake that we made!)