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)
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.
