Who doesn’t like fairy tales? We all have favorite fairy tales we learned from our parents or grandparents when we were growing up.

Right now, thanks to DD’s Chinese uncle (see I have an idea to open a Chinese bookstore online!), I can read all these famous traditional English fairy tales to DD in Chinese. All the story books contain the Chinese characters and the Pinyin (phonetic transcriptions).

Although I don’t deliberately teach her pinyin at her age (see The reason why NOT to teach babies pinyin), these story books offer a great way for her to get familiar with Chinese characters and even recognize them later. The accompanying appealing and colorful cartoons illustrations also help engage her and compliment the text. [......]

Fairytales for children, Fairytales in Chinese | August 28, 2010 8:19 pm | Comments (0)

After three series of learning Chinese (how to call family members in Chinese, how to name body parts in Chinese and how to name vegetables and fruits in Chinese), the forth lesson series starts today: Lesson 4-Animals.

The animals in this series include wild and domestic animals, sorted alphabetically by common name. Today, I am going to teach you to say alligator, ant, anteater and armadillo in Chinese.
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chinese language for young children, Chinese learning for babies, How to say alligator in Chinese?, How to say ant in Chinese?, How to say anteater in Chinese?, How to say armadillo in Chinese?, learn chinese for free | August 19, 2010 7:29 pm | Comments (0)

I found this recipe in Book of Soups by the Culinary Institute of America. The author’s note caught my attention: “this silky-smooth cream soup derives its thickness and most of its texture from potatoes rather than roux. The sweetness of the leeks and red peppers make a wonderful combination”. Sound so yummy! I was eager to give it a try.

And…M loves it and DD loves it! That should be enough! The following recipe is based on the original one from Book of Soups.

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Get Children eat vegetables: Creamy potato soup with roasted red pepper and leek, How to get children eat vegetables? | August 11, 2010 7:20 pm | Comments (1)

Sometimes, I looked at DD, I was wondering: is she really a two-year old? She has been growing so big and tall.

At month 25, she was already near half of my height and more than a quarter of my weight. A 3T or 4T shirt wasn’t large enough for her. The perfect size was 5T. Shoes with the size of 5.5W seemed to get tight overnight. She needed an upgrade to 7W.

She could point to an object that I named, recognize the names of many objects, major body parts and some familiar members in English and Chinese, follow simple instructions, repeat some words she overhears, wash and dry hands, hop like a bunny, brush teeth (well, kind of) and play make-believe.

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Baby’s growth, month 25 | August 3, 2010 8:00 pm | Comments (1)

Recently, there is a surge of visits on one specific post in my blog: The best cartoon series: Avatar The Last Airbender.

This post was published on March 18, 2010. The visitors for this post jumped from merely 4 in March and 5 in April, to 32 in May and 78 in June, and further to 500 in July. And more visitors keep coming everyday in August.

Since I didn’t do any advertisement about my blog, all these visits were sent organically by searching engines, like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and etc. Many visitors used the keywords “avatar the last airbender map” to find this post.

As a big fan of this cartoon series Avatar The Last Airbender, I am so glad that more and more people become fans. [......]

The cartoon series Avatar The Last Airbender becomes more popular! | July 28, 2010 6:25 pm | Comments (1)

Since June (I have an idea to open a Chinese bookstore online!), I have been working on building the online bilingual bookstore. I decided to call it an online “bilingual bookstore” rather than a “Chinese bookstore”, since I might add other language books and multimedia later, for an instance, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and etc.

The bookstore is supposed to be open on Monday, November 1 2010. My dear fellow-readers, welcome to shop with us during the grand-opening. With your support, more books for more languages will be available for parents who want to bring up babies bilingual. And I can continue to produce and develop more posts for the blog, including free Chinese language lessons. [......]

Best4Future bilingual bookstore is under construction | July 24, 2010 3:29 pm | Comments (0)

82000 cribs were recalled?!

I immediately opened a link attached to this email, and went through all the listed recalls in baby cribs, car seats, strollers, food, medicine, toys, baby clothing, appliances and more.

Yes! Simplicity for Children was exactly the company which manufactured DD’s crib! And DD’s crib, Ellis Ellis Deluxe 4-in-1 Convertible Sleep System with the model number 8676C fell into the recall list.

This recall involves ALL Simplicity cribs with tubular metal mattress-support frames regardless of model number.
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deadly Simplicity cribs, Simplicity crib recall, Simplicity drop-side crib recall, Simplicity play yard recall, Simplicity products recall | July 16, 2010 7:10 pm | Comments (6)

Since September 2009, once a week, I have been putting out a lesson on how to name vegetables and fruits in Chinese. Today’s lesson is the last episode of this series.

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chinese language for young children, Chinese learning for babies, How to say tomato in Chinese?, How to say watermelon in Chinese?, How to say yam in Chinese?, How to say zucchini in Chinese? learn chinese for free | July 8, 2010 9:01 am | Comments (1)

Since her one-year birthday when she made her first independent stride, the last one year has been a banner year for DD’s physical development. Now she can run in loops, walk on her tiptoes, avoid obstacles that block her path, sit and stand quickly, and walk upstairs, downstairs, backward and sideways with no problem. And on her two-year birthday, she got the idea of jumping and hopped like an energizer bunny since then.

At month 24, she finally began to accept the training toilet again. This time, I learned the lesson and didn’t push too hard. Instead I asked her whether she wanted or not. If she wanted to try her potty seat, she would take off her diaper and sat on the potty seat for a few seconds.

Whenever she stopped for a few minutes during play to have a bowel movement, I would ask her the same question. It was up to her to say “yes” or “no”. Even she turned it down most of time, it was ok. The goal at this stage was to help her feel comfortable with sitting on the potty seat

Still, unlike most 2-year-olds who want to play side-by-side, DD wanted to play with other kids. She was still bit of aggressive when playing with her peers, mostly boys. She still wanted to hug or kiss other toddlers at her age, which always scared them away. She still chased big sisters and insisted to be accepted, which often happened as she wished. Overall, she initiated a social action rather than watching and waiting.

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Baby’s growth, month 24 | July 2, 2010 7:18 pm | Comments (1)

Phono-semantic compound, also called semantic-phonetic compound or pictophonetic compound, is composed of two parts: one of a limited set of pictograms, often graphically simplified, which suggests the general meaning of the character, and an existing character pronounced approximately as the new target word.

Considering its size and close assocations among pictograms, ideograms and phono-semantic compounds, my forth advice would be children should use pictograms and ideograms as bases to understand and memorize phono-semantic compounds.

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How to help children learn Chinese characters? (Method 5) | June 25, 2010 7:03 pm | Comments (2)