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.

Introducing Pinyin to Young Children

A quick note to everyone with young children. If your children are not yet old enough to read English very well, we suggest not introducing pinyin yet. Use the pinyin as a guide for yourself, but introduce the characters or only the sounds of the words to your children.

English and pinyin pronunciation varies quite a bit and it is hard for children to keep the distinctions in place when they are just learning to read their first language!

How has your experience gone with teaching children under six Chinese? Other languages? We would love to share your comments and experiences with our other readers!

Thomas the Tank Engine in Mandarin

Chinese: Video of Numbers from 1 to 20 and 20 to 100 by Tens

We were able to take this video (on a very small camera), so here it is. There numbers are from 1 to 20, 30, 40, and 100. The video volunteer is a former television broadcaster, graduate of China's most prestigious film and media university, as well as the executive producer of some major films!

Barbie in Mandarin Chinese - Sample Clip

Ooh, the new Barbie in Mandarin Chinese shows got unpacked today. I took this video by shooting the television with my mobile phone and it's still pretty good, but I hear boxes being unpacked in the background, so I'll replace this video with a better one asap...leaving this sample here in the meantime.

As soon as the new products are put up on the site, I will post a note here, too. Here is the link for our Mandarin Chinese DVDs for children.