Bilingual English and Chinese Montessori Flashcards: Land, Air, Water

These nifty bilingual English-Chinese Montessori flashcards are available on the Montessori House site in Adobe PDF format.

You can also create your own DIY flashcards in this traditional three-part format that has been adapted for teaching foreign languages.

These cards are a joint creation with Lori from Montessori for Everyone!

Pororo in Mandarin Chinese DVD Clip

Yup, another clip that I took by pointing my mobile phone at the TV and taking a short video, so the quality of this clip is not great. It's just up to show all of you Pororo fans who asked about Chinese versions what Pororo looks like in Chinese.

The Pororo video set, we have the first set of two DVDs as well as the second set of two DVDs, is in Mandarin and English with subtitle options for both languages, which is nifty because you can watch in Chinese and read the English and vice versa.

Check it out:

Take a peek at our Mandarin Chinese DVD collection for children.

TMNT in Chinese

Another video camera pointed at the tv clip:



The turtles speaking Chinese is very fun, especially if your child has already seen the movie TMNT in English.

You can buy these DVDs and VCDs in Mandarin Chinese for kids at our shop Popping Pandas.

Teletubbies Speaking Mandarin Chinese

Here is my shaky clip from pointing the video camera at the tv screen:



Anything that encourages children to listen to spoken Chinese is great. If you speak Chinese and can sing, you're golden! Otherwise, our DVDs and programs are fantastic for listening practice. It is important for children to soak in the tones and pronunciation now. Vocabulary enhancement and everything else can come later.

Sandpaper Letters: Chinese Characters for Children

Here are the traditional Montessori Sandpaper Letters. We suggest making simple sandpaper letters for Chinese characters so your child can trace the characters in addition to seeing them and hearing the sounds.

Put together card stock or other firm material. Use fine-grained sandpaper or any other material that gives you a bumpy surface to trace. If your child is old enough not to bite on the paper, you can also use a thick glue on top of a print out of the numbers to create a raised and texturally-appealing surface.

Here are three characters to start with as you make the cards (your child can listen to the numbers in our number video below if you do not have a recording of them):


一 (yī)

二 (èr)

三 (sān)

You only need to use the characters, not the pinyin. Oh, and in the original Montessori equipment, note that the colors are not for decoration as the vowels are red and the consonants are blue.

For the characters, I highly suggest only using one color for now. You can set up different types of characters with different colors later on - -for example, verbs could be on red card stock.

Great Bilingual Books for Children: Chinese Characters, Pinyin, English, and Wonderful Photos

We just got a few great books in and I thought I'd share some vocabulary words via pictures! You can right click to save the photos to print out for your children.

Bilingual Mandarin Chinese and English Books

Colors in Chinese: Red, Yellow, and Blue

Here are the color names in Chinese that match the first three colors in the Montessori Color Tablets Box:

红色 = hóngsè = red
黄色 = huángsè = yellow
蓝色 = lánsè = blue

(these three examples should copy and paste well into Word for printing...please let me know if they don't).

If you have the Dora DVDs in Chinese, you will see these color names used a lot. The "se" part of the word is usually needed in conjunction with the color name -- a lot of flash cards and books have only "hong" for the color red, for example, but you usually need to say "hongse" when you talk about the color -- excuse my lack of tone marks here, they take a while to add, so I am just using them in the formal examples for kids above.

We have fun bilingual color word flash cards that we created in conjnction with Lori at Montessori for Everyone.