Preschool Book and CD to Learn Chinese
I saw this on a blog somewhere in cyberspace and I wanted to try it out with my kids. My Chinese tutor really likes this book because songs and nursery rhymes are a great way to expose kids to Chinese. The nursery rhymes are familiar to English speakers which makes this a really appealing book to toddlers, preschoolers, and early elementary school students. The Chinese nursery rhymes have both phonetics, Chinese characters, and English along with Chinese cultural information and full-color illustrations.
If you don’t speak Chinese, a good way to use this book would be to play the CD and have your child follow along with the book until the songs are familiar. Then just play the songs (even download the CD into your iPod) and play as often as possible. If you sing songs as part of a bedtime routine, you can also play the CD or just sing the songs. The authors did a great job on the CD. The sound quality is great, and the singers have appealing voices with nice instrumental accompaniment.
I could see this book and CD is used in a classroom environment, especially if there is a unit on China or Chinese New Year at Preschool. I also volunteer in the classroom and bring in Asian culture either through a (very) mini foreign language-through-song presentation. This would be perfect because it’s visual and audio in one easy package!
This is a really well-done book and I highly recommend it. $11.53 currently at Amazon.
For other posts on learning Chinese, please see Introducing Kids to Foreign Languages and NY Times article on schools keeping Chinese in their curriculum but not other languages. There is also a great memory/bingo game for Chinese called Kingka. For other resources to help your children learn Chinese, see the footer titled Foreign Languages that has some great websites.
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BEST #OWNVOICES CHILDREN’S BOOKS: My Favorite Diversity Books for Kids Ages 1-12 is a book that I created to highlight books written by authors who share the same marginalized identity as the characters in their books.
We love this book!
Hi Marie,
Yay! So glad you love this book too!