Social Emotional Education for Kids

Emotions are high as we continue to practice social distancing and follow stay-at-home orders, in our best efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19. Many of us are experiencing feelings of anxiety, helplessness, frustration, and worry – all as a natural response to the stress involved in our current global circumstances. All these emotions can be difficult to navigate, and especially so for children who are looking to us adults for comfort and security while they continue learning from home and are missing their friends and extended family members. It can be difficult to manage such big emotions!

It got me really thinking about some effective practices for managing stress and the negative emotions that often come with it. I wanted to have some activities ready for a moment when any one of my children might need some extra comfort or help with addressing their fears or worries. Dealing with depression myself, I know the importance of being able to talk about my struggles with someone I trust and to be able to level my emotions so I can more easily manage them. I wanted to be able to use some of these techniques in a child-friendly way while also integrating some bilingual education and simple facial recognition activities.

Sample pages from Emotions Workbook

I created a 20 page workbook that’s all about emotions! I’ve included some of the most common emotions we experience from day-to-day, and created some activities for recognizing, discussing, and managing these emotions in healthy ways. Included are social emotional activity ideas, coloring pages, reading and writing practice, drawing activities, illustrative journal pages, and, of course, bilingual vocabulary practice. You’ll have the opportunity to open up to each other and address the big emotions your children (and you!) may be experiencing – and set in place great emotional health practices for years to come!

You can find the downloadable workbook here in our online store. The material supports bilingual education in English and Korean languages, but can be completed and enjoyed by our monolingual friends, as well!

Here’s to maintaining our mental (and physical) health! Stay safe, everyone!

Teach Your Child Life Science at Home

Being home from work and school is an important public safety measure during our current pandemic, but it can be rough – for all of us. Kids and adults alike are trying their best to transition from their usual school and work environments to working remotely, from the comfort of their homes… where their TV and all their favorite snacks are… where the couch is comfortable and Lego sets beg to be played with. It can be a real struggle to focus!

We’ve been trying to keep our kids on track with their virtual classrooms, while also entertaining them in quiet times between classwork. The balancing act between parent, employee, home-school teacher, and chef is leaving most of us feeling… well, unbalanced. Fortunately, I’ve found some activities that have successfully entertained (and educated) my younger kids – and it isn’t over in a mere five minutes!

Every Spring, we tend to our vegetable garden. The kids love to help me clean out old dead plants, turn the soil, look for worms – all of it. But this year, our weather hasn’t exactly been cooperative. It’s the middle of April and we still have snow – YIKES! We haven’t been able to shake off our desire to get planting, though, so we started some seeds indoors. This has been great for teaching our sons how plants grow, observing the parts of a plant, and using a small magnifying glass to take a close look at roots and germinating seeds. And it doesn’t stop there!

Sample sheets from How Plants Grow Workbook

I’ve put together a 20 page workbook to go along with this activity. The workbook includes coloring sheets, bilingual vocabulary practice, a Plant Growth Process wheel, cut-and-paste charts, matching games… enough to last a week or so. You’ll be able to teach your child about the parts of a plant, about the growth process, practice reading and writing, solve puzzles, and play games – all while watching it happen in front of them! It’s a hands-on learning experience that is sure to fill in some of the gaps of their remote learning!

You can find the downloadable workbook here in our online store. The material supports bilingual education in English and Korean languages, but can be completed and enjoyed by our monolingual friends, as well!

Stay safe and healthy, friends! We are in this together!

Valentine’s Day Worksheets

안녕하세요! With Valentine’s Day approaching, we wanted to create a few heart-themed worksheets that integrated some Korean-language learning. These worksheets are free to download and you can print as many times as you’d like!

Valentine’s Day Color-By-Number Worksheet

Kids have the opportunity to practice their vocabulary with color-by-number and counting activities that pair well with our Bilingual Learning books – PLUS they can print out and color their own Valentine’s to give to friends and family!

Head over to our online store to download our new Valentine’s Day worksheets – and any other worksheets you might like! We hope you have a wonderful Valentine’s Day!

Seollal (설날) – Korean New Year

새해 복 많이 받으세요! Lunar New Year (설날 – Seollal) is just around the corner and we wanted to share a few activities for you and your little one to enjoy in addition to your family’s traditional celebrations!

But first… let’s talk about the Lunar Zodiac!

2020 is the year of the Rat! According to the Lunar Zodiac signs, the year of the Rat is a great year for starting new things and getting a fresh start. This may be a good time to try something new, set new goals, and really put yourself out there! If you’ve been thinking about learning a new language, starting a new job or even starting your own business – maybe this is your year to do it! It is said that those born under this sign are charming and ambitious, but also logical and realist. Were you born in the year of the Rat?

Paper Fan Craft found on aerilynbooks.com

Whatever your traditions are for celebrating the new year, we have a few kid-friendly activities to add to the fun! We’ve added coloring sheets and paper fan crafts to the FREE Downloadable Worksheets section of our online store. Design your own hanbok, make your own paper fans, and color a simple Seollal celebration – and choose from several other learning activities, while you’re at it! They’re all FREE and available to you on aerilynbooks.com. We hope you have a happy new year!

DIY Perler Hangul Set

Create your own Korean alphabet set with Perler beads
DIY Perler Hangul Set

Are your kids creative? Are you looking for a Korean alphabet set? Make your own colorful set together with Perler beads! If you’ve never used Perler beads before, they are plastic beads that you can fuse together with an iron to create all sorts of fun things! An adult will definitely have to do the ironing, but the kids have fun creating the letters.

What you need:
🔹 Perler Beads
🔹 Heat-safe Paper
🔹 Perler Pegboard
🔹 Iron

Play:
🔸 Pick up beads
🔸 Sort by color
🔸 Name each color
🔸 Build shapes or make pictures

Make:
🔹 Build letters on pegboard
🔹 Cover in heat-safe paper
🔹 Iron for a few seconds to fuse (both sides)
🔹 Let cool before handling

Language Booster:
Practice naming colors and shapes in your target languages, while building and creating fun trinkets! Teach your child the Korean alphabet and the letter sounds as you create them together. When you are done, you have a complete set of alphabet toys to use in future activities – we turned ours into magnets for our fridge!

Our kids are big fans of Perler beads! They love to create their favorite Pokemon and video game characters, so they are very familiar with the process. Before making our Hangul set, we played with the beads and created fun designs. The kids were able to exercise their creativity while also squeezing in some language education!

Chopstick Bead Sorting

A classic children’s activity with a twist
Chopstick Bead Sorting Activity for Kids

Here is a great activity that will keep your kids busy for HOURS! It’s a bead-sorting game… with a twist! This activity strengthens your child’s pincer grip, teaches them colors and shapes, can be a great opportunity to boost language-learning, and of course teaches them to sort objects into groups. You can start out simple and build up the challenges as your child gets better at the activity – even my 6 year old loves it!

What you need:
🔹 Colorful plastic beads
🔹 A container for sorting (could be a muffin tin, paper cups, etc)
🔹 Kid’s chopsticks (or even just their fingers!)

What you do:
🔸Pick up one bead at a time
🔸Sort by color, shape, or size
🔸Name each color or shape as you play

Language-Booster:
You can play this game in any language with your child, and in as many as you’d like – it won’t feel like learning, because they are having fun and focusing on the task of moving beads from one container to another. They will want to play over and over again!

When first introducing this activity to my 3-year-old son and niece, we started out simple, only concentrating on how to use the chopsticks and letting them move the beads to whichever cup they wanted. As they got the hang of that, we started sorting the beads by color, naming each out loud in both English and Korean languages. The great thing about this activity: you can add to the challenges, change the sorting criteria, and use with any language you are teaching your child! The possibilities are endless!

Free Downloadable Worksheets

If you’re looking for worksheets and coloring sheets to boost your child’s Korean language education, you’ve come to the right place. We have several downloadable resources available in our online shopand they’re FREE!

Free Downloadable Worksheets in Store

Our worksheets pair well with our Bilingual Learning books and can be used to increase vocabulary retention in a classically fun way! The tactile experience of drawing and writing on paper offers many benefits for children’s development – including the Pincer Grip, which is a crucial fine motor skill. Educational apps can be great, but studies show that the growing use of tablets by young kids is interfering with the strengthening of their hand muscles, resulting in school aged kids unable to correctly hold a pencil and write legibly.

Whether you are teaching your child Korean at home or they attend a Korean language program at school, our worksheets are a great way to boost their language education while strengthening their fine motor skills. Simply add the worksheets to your cart while shopping and you will be sent a link to download the files. Once you have them, you have them forever – print as many as you’d like!

Korean Education for Kids

안녕하세요! We finally started a blog! We wanted a place to share tips, tricks, ideas, activities, and resources with families wanting to teach their children the Korean language. For anyone who isn’t yet familiar with our company, let me give you a brief introduction:

I am passionate about bilingual education. As a child growing up in a Korean-American household, I was interested in learning the Korean language and my mother taught me basic concepts, such as counting, and common phrases, like “Hello,” “Good-bye,” and “I love you.” I loved to read and found myself wishing I had books in Korean, but it seemed impossible to find any at our local bookstore or library. I went on to learn Spanish and continued to try to teach myself Korean with dictionaries and by listening to pop songs. When I became a parent, I knew I wanted to raise my children bilingually, so I introduced them to Spanish and the little Korean I knew, but I still found it impossible to locate bilingual children’s books that taught the Korean language. I joined a couple of mom groups on Facebook in hopes of finding resources and books, but discovered that most families were either buying Korean books from overseas or simply using label makers to add Korean text to books they already had. This is extremely resourceful, but with over 1.2 million Americans speaking Korean, I really feel there ought to be easier access to quality bilingual books that teach the language.

I decided I wanted to create bilingual books my children would love and I dedicated every day to researching, writing, illustrating, and designing my very first Bilingual Learning book. I wanted it to not only include both English and Korean languages, but easy-to-read transliterations to accompany the Hangul (한글 – Korean written language) for anyone who cannot yet read the Korean alphabet. When I was ready, I printed out the PDF at home, introduced it to my kids and they loved it!

I decided to publish it and make it available to other families looking for Korean-English baby books. I discussed the idea with my husband, family, and friends and, after many months of hard work, I launched Aerilyn Books, which I named after my daughter. At the time of writing this, I have published two Bilingual Learning books: Colors | 색상 and Numbers | 숫자.

Child reading Colors | 색상 while riding in the car
Child reading Colors | 색상 while riding in the car.

Colors | 색상 teaches children the colors of the rainbow, in sequence, plus other common colors. Each color is introduced by name and also used in a simple sentence accompanied by beautifully illustrated animals. Target vocabulary words are color-coded for visual learners, transliterations allow adults who cannot read Hangul to pronounce the words when reading aloud to their children, and the illustrated animals provide additional vocabulary that will maintain your child’s interest.

Child reading Numbers | 숫자
(Customer Submission)

Numbers | 숫자 introduces children to the Korean native number system by counting fruits and veggies from 1 to 10. Each number is identified by name and used in short simple phrases along with paper cut-out illustrations of common fruits and veggies, providing additional vocabulary and reinforcing familiarity with healthy food choices.

Bilingual Learning Books
Bilingual Learning books: Colors | 색상 and Numbers | 숫자

The Bilingual Learning books are made of durable board for repeated handling by little hands, and are conveniently sized for taking along anywhere. We will be announcing the third title in the series January 2, so stay tuned for that!

In addition to our popular books, we post FREE illustrated vocabulary cards, with audio, Monday through Friday on our Facebook and Instagram pages, so you can introduce your child to a new vocabulary word every day of the school week. Make sure to follow us to take advantage of the free resources and stay up-to-date with announcements, events, and giveaways!

We will post a new blog entry whenever we have new resources to share with you: language-boosting activities, downloadable worksheets and coloring sheets, new book announcements, book-signings, and more – we hope you will find our content valuable in your journey of raising bilingual children!