Welcome to DoughDough, a place where creative learning, visual stimulation, thought provoking fun and playful inspirations all come together as one, a place that strives to uphold the ideas that learning should be an adventure and learning should be fun.
Dough-dough’s story started when I was young and read a book which was given to me by my older sister, “The Little Girl at the Window” <窗口邊的小豆豆> by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. Dough-dough, comes from the main character’s name in the book and it also means BEANS/PEAS, something that when planted and nurtured will grow. This engaging series of childhood recollections tells about an idea a school had in Tokyo during World War II that combined learning with fun, freedom and love. I fell in love with the unusual school that also had old railroad cars for classrooms, and since then I became a firm believer in freedom of expressions and activities.
Art and design has always played a big part in my life and before Dough-dough and even before my time as a mum. I gained a bachelors and masters degree in Visual Communication and I also worked in advertising and design industries as a web/graphic designer for more than fifteen years, learning how to express ideas and communicate with images.
With both the influence from the book and the art and design experience from my career, I then began my roller-coaster journey in passing my knowledge in Mandarin to my children. Unlike living in a native speaking country, the UK lacks practice opportunities and my children were having a hard time to learn Mandarin, so I began by creating “teaching resources” specifically for my children by gathering lots of ideas from their playing habits, characters they loved and cartoons they watched, and before I knew it, they were starting to make conversations in Mandarin with me.
To my surprise, they even remembered all the Chinese characters that I had drawn them, rather than just teaching them the characters the traditional way. Since then I continued to transform each character into pictures for them to memorise, I also created songs to help them and that proved to me again just how powerful learning through games, playing, drawing and singing can be!
To be honest I wasn’t very confident when I first started teaching Mandarin to a class full of students with their parents watching on, as anyone always feels when they try something new. But I always had faith in the method and all the teaching resources that I have created. Children can learn best when they have freedom of expression and engaging activities and being in an environment surrounded by all the resources they need to learn.
Here at DoughDough, you can find lots of ideas and resources that we have created to help you achieve what I’ve experienced.