Updated May 2020: Finally, after 4 years, I’ve just uploaded everything to Teachers Pay Teachers for easy management. You can check out all the materials.
Finally, after months of feeling uninspired to prep (I know, so bad!), I spent some time this past weekend finishing my Chutes and Ladders set for Sagebooks. It’s about time because Astroboy is now on Set 4 of Sagebooks and he really needs to work with the characters in some other ways to spice things up.
For awhile I was worried that he was forgetting characters left and right, because he couldn’t remember them when I reviewed with Anki. However, this week I put all of Set 1, 2, 3’s treasure boxes in the car and he read them while we ran around time. I was very surprised he really had no problem with set 1 or set 2, even though he couldn’t remember many characters in set 2 with Anki.
In any case, below are some free, and not so free, items I’ve created as companions to Sagebook.
1. Hundred Board
When I was trying to figure out exactly how many characters Thum
per knew out of Sagebooks, I whipped up some quick Hundred Boards, laminated them, and had her circle the words she didn’t know. I would recommend that you have them circle characters they do know instead so as not to discourage them.
The hundred board is versatile. Whatever you do with English hundred boards or sight word boards you can probably do with these. For example, when I was lazy, Astroboy and I played games where we just tried to walk from the first square to the last, alternating dice rolls and saying whatever character we landed on.
I’ve never tried this, but for numbers hundred board, we’ve done color by number, where a list of numbers are generated and you have to color in those numbers to form a pictures. The kids even created their own pictures and had the other child do it to see what they drew.
2. Flash Cards
As you know, I have to make life difficult for myself because I often find materials lacking in their design. I made a set of flash cards which have the radicals in a different color. Montessori is all about the unconscious mind absorbing from the environment right? I hoped that the kids would pick it up that way.
Flashcards are fairly versatile as well. After laminating, you can draw on them. Thumper’s used them to learn character components and Astroboy has tried sorting the cards by their radicals. Our zhuyin teacher had the brilliant idea of asking the children to write the zhuyin in the back of each card, as a way to practice zhuyin. Thumper’s also created stories and sentences by rearranging cards. Whatever you can think of to manipulate a material, you can do with these.
There are too many cards, otherwise I would duplicate them and do matching exercises with them.
3. Chutes and Ladders
Astroboy loves playing Chutes and Ladders. Thumper, not so much because the characters were too easy for her. For the first Set (Blue series), I made 20 character Chutes and Ladder versions. Once Astroboy learned enough characters, he moved onto the 50 character versions. Otherwise we were done way too quickly with the game!
4. Anki Packs
I use these packs to help Astroboy review his characters on the days when he’s not into reading the Readers and I want to see just what he knows from the previous sets. Really, I should just use them as intended, a spaced repetition tool. Kids are amazing. It took him 15 minutes to figure out how to mark the characters on the tablet, either as a character he remembers or one he doesn’t.
But, that does require that you sit with the kid while they review. Otherwise sometimes they mis-identify a character and doesn’t know it.
This blog post talks more about it and the character packs are at the end of the post.
5. Skritter Packs
Of course, since we’re now using Skritter to learn stroke order and write for Thumper, I had to create character packs to share as well.
This blog post talks more about it and the character packs are at the end of the post.
This set was created by Sookie4 rather than me. I made a version for Quizlet as well
when I was trying to do something similar to my Anki packs. Quizlet didn’t suit my needs for assessment. However, this set is for the children to practice zhuyin and matching zhuyin to the characters.
Mandarin Mama wrote a whole post about it.
7. Character Writing Practice Booklets
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