I am bilingual and I would like both my children to learn Chinese, which is their mother tongue, as it will be very useful wherever they go. I am not great at teaching my children Chinese and have to find fun ways to get them to learn. We did this craft with our Lichfield Mandarin Club last year and this has proved to be a very useful way to teach children.
If you would like to know more about how the 12 animals were named in the Chinese zodiac, check out the explanation from wikipedia.
These are the 12 animals, in the order that they come:
Rat – 鼠
Ox – 牛
Tiger – 虎
Rabbit – 兔
Dragon – 龍
Snake – 蛇
Horse – 馬
Goat – 羊
Monkey – 猴
Rooster – 雞
Dog – 狗
Pig – 豬
To make this Chinese Zodiac stick craft, I have googled and found two templates to download. I took the cute animals templates from xcn-chinese and the Chinese characters from vectorstock. But please note that there is a missing stroke on the Chinese character Goat. Feel free to google and download free images that you think are more suitable.
To make this craft, you need:
- 12 ice cream sticks
- Templates (animals and Chinese character)
- Glue
- Scissors
1. Cut out all the animals.
2.Teach the children to identify the Chinese characters and ask them to match the animals with it. Also teach them the animal cycle by placing them in their order.
3. Glue the templates onto the ice cream sticks. On one side is the matching animal and on the other side is the matching Chinese character.
Instead of using plain ice cream sticks, I used coloured ice cream sticks: yellow, green, orange and purple and applied these in a sequence. It helps them to remember them more easily by using colours. These are the examples:
You can also make it in to a game by giving them three choices and guessing what comes next etc.
This is a very simple craft yet it can benefit the children in learning matching games and the Chinese zodiac. Hope this is useful for you and and your child/ren!
So lovely to see the children getting involved too
Thank you a lovely informative post
It can be so difficult teaching your kids their mother tongue..My understand understands but refusing to speak it for some strange reason
What a fab idea for teaching your kids about your culture. I was just writing about how hard it is to make sure they know it and understand, so I totally see myself in your post.
This is a great idea – and it could be adapted for so many things… I could even use it in teaching!
What a great idea! I had a great chat with my kids and partner recently about the facets of all of our Chinese signs and googling their meanings. It was alot of fun – and this would defo be a great way to teach younger kids 🙂
Lovely activity , kids learn well when they learn through play.
That looks like great fun!
Languages and culture are so important, your children will have the best of both worlds!
My daughter learnt some Mandrin in an after school club last year and thoroughly enjoyed it she came home teaching me some words.
Great idea to use coloured sticks
What a great idea – my Mum used to be a nursery nurse I’ll have to show her this idea as she’s still in touch with many of them there and they always look for ideas around celebrations. x
This is great! I need to do more like this for our arabic things
This is such a good idea!
很好
Fantastic idea! I agree, Chinese does seem like a hard language to learn. This will help though! Thanks!
These are lovely. How do you say very good in Mandarin? Hung Hao?
What a great idea, will have to remember this when Monkey learns about it all at school
Chinese seems like such a hard language to grasp, these look like a great way to help your children.
That’s a great idea! Z is learning about Chinese New Year at school and he’s loving it.