Favorite sites

♠Favorite Blogs
http://tamarindvillage.blogspot.com/2009/12/reading-chinese-books.html
a mother in Singapore talks about her experience teaching her children Chinese. I really enjoy her posts on how to help her children to become bilingual (English and Chinese). One thing to note is that her children are WAY advance than my children and I would imagine any average American children. Even look at what her children are reading in English at age 5-6, they are probably at least 2-3 grades ahead of standard American reading levels. For Chinese, my son took literally a year to go over the same ground her daughter and son spent 3 months learning. But I still find her posts very inspirational and I agree with her completely that the way to help children learn Chinese well is to introduce them to lots of books so they love the language. I agree that if we make our children write too much, drill too much then they will end up hating Chinese which is really counter productive.

Favorite Shopping sites
www.dangdang.com
Kinda like Amazon.com of China, lots of good cheap Chinese storybooks and videos, etc

www.childbook.com
An online shopping site in America which focuses on helping children in America or other non Chinese speaking countries learn Chinese. What I found is that this site has good introductory textbook materials and DVDs to learn Chinese. But once I bought all the introductory textbooks and DVDs from this site, I found it limiting in terms of finding more storybooks. So I moved onto dangdang.com once my initial introductory need was over.

Favorite sites for iPad
www.beva.com
very cute site which has some free Chinese storybooks, speaks slowly, uses simple sentences and simple vocabulary. I think they are probably targetted to Mainland Chinese children between 0-3 years old, but they are perfect for my 3-6 years old.

Favorite publishers to find simple Chinese books
www.ppp.com.hk
www.sagebooks.com.hk