My daughter is 16 months old and I want her to learn Chinese. Since she was born I’ve been talking to her in Chinese and her Chinese vocab is really improving. She has a Chinese name and she associates herself with it and calls herself by her Chinese name. My husband is Caucasian so I’m the only parent that can speak to her in Chinese. My plans were to have my parents as well to help talk to her and expose her to more Chinese, but since the pandemic happened we’ve been restricted in gatherings. So she’s all I’ve got for now until restrictions are lifted. I’ve been bombarding her with color and color sorting activities to try to teach her colors in Chinese. Here’s another color activity I found on Pinterest and thought to try out with a slight modification to add some Chinese into it. This fun sensory activity is great for toddlers.
Play with Paint Sensory Chinese Activity
Chinese Vocab:
- Red (紅, hong sik)
- Orange (橙, chang)
- Yellow (黃, wong)
What you need:
So object is just to have her play with the paint in the ziplock. She doesn’t know what a ziplock is and never experienced paint in a bag before so I was interested in how she would interact with it. Typically she plays with something for 5-10 minutes, or we sit together and we interact in Chinese and play around with it. I just used 3 ziplock bags, paint and a black sharpie. The paint was squeezed into the ziplock bag and closed. The color was written on the bag in Chinese. Obviously I shouldn’t have written on both sides of the ziplock bag because it’s clear, duh. So don’t make the same mistake as me.
Result:
At first I put too little paint because it was all smeared in the bag when I was demonstrating how to play with it.
So more paint was squeezed into the ziplock bag. We played around with the paint in the bag and smearing it all over the bag inside. She was intrigued with it, pushing the paint around. She wasn’t totally thrilled with the activity, perhaps she’s too young for it right now or maybe it wasn’t messy enough. She did want to play with the paint bottle and squeeze it into the bag. I interacted with her in Chinese telling her this is orange, this is red, this is yellow. What around you is yellow/red/orange? What does the paint feel like in the bag? Can you make swirls/patterns with it?
Well all this vocab is really foreign to her so it was really an exercise in exposing her to different words. The sensory part she had fun smooshing the paint around, loved seeing the colors go everywhere. I’m sure she would have loved to see the paint go everywhere on her, the floors and couch instead. Maybe save that for next time. This was a fun paint activity, low setup but didn’t have a long staying power for my 16 month old daughter.
Mommy dragon
