When to introduce Chinese to children? (Free Printable!)

How does a young child pick up a language?

The environment where your child is raised, be it the spoken language, toys they play, caregiver or friends, create a substantial amount of influence in a child's learning and development. This is the same goes for language skills.

In the initial developmental years of a child, one of the ways language is picked up is mainly from hearing the spoken language. This can be through nursery rhymes, which you can find them for free at Baidu (I just typed 儿歌大全100首连播放). Chinese songs are a good way to start through their catchy rhythm and music, it creates a natural immersive auditory environment for your child.

Another good way is by reading Chinese books. Reading aloud with your child not only engage their auditory skills, it also allow a child to understand and associate the story heard with the visual pictures and get accustom to seeing the Chinese words on the book.

So when do you introduce stroke writing to children?

Before starting a child on writing, a crucial developmental area is to develop their hand grip for pre-writing. This can be done through fine motor kinaesthetics activities such as:

- forming Chinese characters through play dough

- placing pom poms on Chinese characters

- using tweezers to lift small erasers on Chinese characters

- pasting stickers on Chinese characters

- art and craft on the Chinese characters

We have created a common Chinese strokes mat to introduce to your child before teaching stroke writing! Don't worry if you are not able to read strokes, this mat comes with the stroke name in Chinese and in hanyupinyin as well! (Scroll down to see the link to your FREE printable!)

Some of the many ways to use this stroke writing mat:

- Use playdough to form the strokes on the mat

- Laminate the mat and use marker to write the strokes again and again and again!

- Use a pencil to write the strokes

- Call out a stroke and ask the child to point to the correct stroke

- Call out a colour and ask the child to point to a stroke with that colour

When your child has developed a good grip of the pencil/pen/marker, it is time to start stroke writing!

For more playdough ideas, check out our themed packs below:

Erasable Numbers Writing Cards with 10 frame

Erasable Weather Writing Cards

Erasable At The Farm Writing Cards

My family Writing Cards

Do you know that most of our Chinese stroke writing cards have a different colour for each stroke?

Yes, besides labeling our strokes with numerals, each of the numeral and stroke is colour coded so that it is easier for your child to identify the number and the stroke.

Subscribe here as a member to get this pack of 9 chinese stroke writing/play dough mat printable and more for FREE! （It's free to subscribe to our mailing list!)

Enjoy writing!