today is.....

We're trying to get the concept of saying the date. In Chinese it is said

"jin tian shi"_____ = today is____

So today we said:

Jin tian shi jiu yue (September), san hao (third day), er ling ling jiu nian (2009 year)

We graphed numbers up to ten to start to see the relationships between them. Encourage your children to count everything they can and talk to them about more and less (ex. you have three cars. Is that more or less than your brother who has two)

Splitting up groups of things into smaller groups will also help them see number combinations and help them with addition and subtraction. You can ask then to see how many ways they can split things up (ten fruit snacks total can be split  into two groups how many different ways).

 And these are just suggestions if you get a chance, don't feel like you need to do all of them:)

Also here's some websites if you're wondering how to pronounce these strange letter combinations you're now seeing......

http://mandarin.about.com/od/pronunciation/l/blsounds.htm   Basic pronunciation 

http://www.languageguide.org/mandarin/    Listen to vocabulary

http://mandarin.about.com/od/pronunciation/a/tones.htm  Tone practice

There is so much (good and bad) out there to help with Chinese.  I'll keep looking and posting things as I find them. If you come across something great, post it one here so all can know.

I'm working on getting some sort of recording that I can send home so you can listen to the vocabulary.