Have a Fruity Summer!
We tend to eat more fruit in summer as they help our body keep cool during the heat. And kids love fruit. They are colorful, delicious and sweet - what's not to love? As my daughter is obsessed with fruit (taking more than 5 a day!) at the moment, we are going through a fruit theme here.
As usual, I have created an A3 poster to go through the vocabulary of some of my daughter's favorite fruit with her. As I have most of the fruit at home, why not use them too? I put them in a bowl so my daughter can pick out each fruit as we go. Being able to see and touch the real thing really encourages kids to further explore and learn.
So here are some more suggestions on how you can bring this theme to the next level:
1. Take a trip to the grocery store and pick out the fruit you've learned. At the grocery store, you can point out the different shapes of the fruit. The Shapes poster may come in handy if a refresher is needed beforehand.
2. At home, lay the Fruit poster on the floor and let your kids put the real fruit on the poster. You can encourage them to talk about the size, color and texture of the fruit. You could refer to the Color poster too when going through colors.
3. Then comes the fun part - cut the fruit open to see the inside of them, smell them and...eat them!
4. If you can't finish all the fruit, just chop them up and make a fruit salad. I gave a little bowl of leftover fruit salad to my daughter as snack on the next day and asked her to identify each piece of fruit. Don't do it if you're in a rush because it took my daughter almost an hour to finish that little bowl of fruit salad!
5. If you need to burn off those little bit of fruit calories, sing and dance along with this traditional Cantonese fruit song 排排坐、吃果果 (Jyutping: paai4 paai4 co5 hek3 gwo2 gwo2).
6. Last but not least, go fruit picking! I bet Google can help you find a pick your own fruit farm nearby. Kids love to review their harvest and that's the perfect opportunity to teach them (or practice) how to count in Cantonese. Here's the Chinese character and Jyutping pronuncation of 1 to 10 in Cantonese.
1 一 jat1
2 二 ji6
3 三 saam1
4 四 sei3
5 五 ng5
6 六 luk6
7 七 cat1
8 八 baat3
9 九 gau2
10 十 sap6
I hope you enjoy this theme as much as we do. Leave a comment and let me know what your favorite fruit is!
