At the Beach

Rating:
Summary: a wonderful lesson
Review: By drawing pictures in the sand a mother teachers her young son how to write Chinese characters. This is a marvelous idea, reminding us how thousands of years ago Chinese people took sticks and scratched pictures in the mud, thus inventing the very first Chinese characters. In this book we learn how to draw the characters for the words "person," "big," "small,""sky,""water," "mountain," "sand," "woman," "child" and "good." Through beautiful cut paper illustrations we can easily see the similarities between characters and real life objects. Huy Voun Lee is the talented writer and illustrator of two other books in this series - "In the Park" and "In the Snow." I highly recommend all three.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book for children curious about Chinese writing
Review: By drawing pictures in the sand a mother teachers her young son how to write Chinese characters. This is a marvelous idea, reminding us how thousands of years ago Chinese people took sticks and scratched pictures in the mud, thus inventing the very first Chinese characters. In this book we learn how to draw the characters for the words "person," "big," "small,""sky,""water," "mountain," "sand," "woman," "child" and "good." Through beautiful cut paper illustrations we can easily see the similarities between characters and real life objects. Huy Voun Lee is the talented writer and illustrator of two other books in this series - "In the Park" and "In the Snow." I highly recommend all three.

Rating:
Summary: a wonderful lesson
Review: Having recently adopted a beautiful toddler from China, we have purchased all the books by this author to start teaching her (and ourselves) a little Chinese. The author has a lovely style of teaching the pictures behind the pictograms. A great book (as are all by this author)!

Rating:
Summary: a fun book for kids
Review: Lee, a native of Cambodia, creates a children's book that explains some Chinese language characters, characters that look like what they mean. Xiao Ming and his mother go to the beach, where Xiao Ming likes to draw Chinese characters in the sand with a stick. Xiao Ming and the reader learn 10 characters. One character is introduced per double page. They are drawn and explained, and for each character, the illustration matches the character. "Person", for example (ren/wren), looks like a person walking down a beach, right foot leading one's left. "Big", (da/dah), looks like person but with an additional horizontal line, or a person on his back with outstretched arms and legs (and thus the illustration of a person lying in the sand). The word for "sky" follows later. It adds another horizontal line to person and big, as if something is sheltering the person. Seven other words are learned ending with "Good" (hao/how), which looks remarkably like a mother holding her child at the beach. Mandarin pronunciations are used.

Rating:
Summary: Fun Book!
Review: This book will allow my Chinese-Vietnamese students to share their writing and culture with other students in my class. It allows me to understand the written Chinese language better myself. Excellent!