It’s school holidays this week in Australia. Now that covid cases are down in Sydney, I feel more at ease about taking the kids out. And this month, we are focusing on learning Chinese sea animals.

Da Bao is a huge animal lover and regularly chooses encyclopedias as his top choice of night time reading. Er Bao and Xiao Bao are also getting into animals now, so I thought this would be a great opportunity to teach them all about animals in Mandarin Chinese.

So for Week 1, we went to the aquarium to check out the magnificent sea creatures.

Starting off, I created these Sea Creatures flashcards to teach them at home first. For teaching activities with these flashcards, check out this post where I share with you my personal suggestions on how to teach using Montessori flashcards. 

(If you are interested in my other awesome flashcards, please check out this post).

I am a big believer in educational display, so I made this Sea Creatures Word Mat Poster to go along with our unit of study. If you only purchase one item to teach, I strongly recommend this as the kids see it daily and love looking at the pictures, and labelling them, all without me directing them to do so! My printer prints on A3 size paper which I find big enough for our home learning needs. If you do not have access to an A3 size printer, you can use your printer and Adobe Acrobat Reader to print out posters and banners. 

To give you an example, Xiao Bao who is 3 years old in 2 months, can label 10 out of the 12 labels on the word mat. Da Bao who is 6 years old can label all the sea creatures.