Colour me bean!
My daughter really loves the kitchen: watching me or grandma cooking meals, disturbing her auntie when she’s in the middle of stirring a pot (and then it burns!), taking part in a little stirring herself, wearing the apron, finding all the ingredients for us.
One night, she was watching a silent (I think it might be labelled as ASMR now, haha) video of Li Ziqi growing and cooking with potatoes. She suddenly jumped up halfway through the video and opened up the pantry to pull out some potatoes. Then she told her auntie, rather bossily might I add, “they need to be washed”!
Recently, she’s taken quite a liking to an ‘essential’-grade book in the Le Le Chinese 樂樂文化 reading set all about different coloured beans. There’re red beans, black beans, white beans, green beans… A lot of beans! Thankfully grandma always has a stock of each, so I thought it would be a good idea to make an activity out of it - give her some physical sensations to pair with what she was reading/hearing the pen read. (We’ve written a whole post about physical sensation in learning!)
What’ve we bean up to?
I guess my main aim was to try and encourage her to differentiate colours and organise them while she’s doing something creative.
We’ve bean reading.
I wanted to let her try to associate the beans and colours with the book and words she hears in the book. So we read it together and we’d find the different beans - got me running around a bit!
We’ve bean sorting.
I offered a little mix of all the beans, like the last picture in the book, and then we started sorting out the beans into an egg box.
We’ve bean drawing.
I helped her use glue to draw outlines of a picture on some paper. Then we cracked open the egg box and started picking different coloured beans for different outlines and fillings to stick onto the paper.
It was pretty fun - even for me! I feel like my daughter really enjoyed the D.I.Y. as a change from the normal activities like the PlayMags, wooden blocks, or a puzzle. On top of that, she got a cute picture from our little sensory experiment!
Not bean stocking?
I say that’s fine! If you don’t have the book, you can still do all of this with your own homemade flashcards. If you don’t have the right beans, do it with just colours or different types of food.
My main goal was to engage my daughter with linking words and the sounds of words to physical objects. It just added another dimension to her learning to solidify it.
UPDATE (14/07/2021 14:42): As of today, we have joined the Le Le Chinese Affiliate Program but please note that this post was written before the affiliate program ever existed! You can use our affiliate link below to get 5% off your order with Le Le when you use ‘LELEDEZIREMI’. Every purchase made with this link helps support this blog and the day-to-day running of the bookshop - so thank you in advance! And thank you to Le Le Chinese!
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Have you done this before or have you gone and tried it after reading this? Got any other ideas that you think we’d like? What do you think of this method of learning? What things do you do to engage your child in reading? Please, let us know in the comments below! We’re always happy to chat!