Tag: activity

A Time for Showing Gratitude

Thanksgiving is almost here and we wanted to take a moment to say THANK YOU!

Something we like to do at home is to make lists of everyone and everything we are grateful for in our lives and why. Right now, our kids are writing short letters to family members expressing their gratitude and appreciation. It is one way we try to teach our children to never take anyone or anything for granted and to always communicate openly about their feelings.

We’ve spent the past few months really focusing on our time together as a family, making great memories and using this continued period of cautious social distancing to strengthen our relationships with each other. As a result, we haven’t kept up with this blog the way we originally had planned. We apologize for this absence, but thank each and every one of you who has continued to support us and our efforts, who has used our resources and learned with us over on Facebook and Instagram, for all the loving messages and emails we have received sharing with us how our products have made a positive impact in your home – you’ve touched our hearts and it all truly means the world to us!

Navigating through shipment delays and other COVID related hurtles has been difficult and we continue to watch the landscape of our publishing experience change, but your love and support has shown us that it is all worth it! From the bottom of our hearts – THANK YOU!

Let’s Be Grateful Activity Sheet on aerilynbooks.com

If you are looking for a Thanksgiving activity, head over to our online store and download our FREE Thanksgiving activity sheet so you and your family can make a list of all you are thankful for, as well. We hope you have a happy, healthy, and safe holiday with your loved ones!

Happy Thanksgiving!

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!