The Chinese tangram is an ancient puzzle made from a paper square cut into seven pieces. These seven pieces are then used to make all kinds of shapes, pictures and puzzles. You can buy plastic models of Chinese tangrams complete with ideas of pictures for the children to create. Working with tangrams helps kindergartners to learn about geometrical shapes and helps their visual-spatial skills to develop.
The abacus was in use in China as early as 500 B.C. Making a Chinese abacus is a great project for kindergartners because it's a hands-on way to learn to count and calculate. With an abacus, kindergartners can learn to add and subtract, and they can even be introduced to the concept of positive and negative numbers. Once the kids have each made an abacus, they can play racing games to see who can come up with the correct answers first. The teacher announces a problem, and the children hold their abacuses up in the air when they have the correct answer.
Chinese dominoes is a game for two players, so you'll have to divide the kindergartners into groups of two and provide each group with one set of dominoes. You can make Chinese dominoes out of popsicle sticks. You'll need 64 popsicle sticks for a set as well as black and red permanent markers for putting dots on the ends of the sticks. See the Resources section below for a link to a printable set of Chinese dominoes to be used as your guide. Show the kindergartners how to shuffle the dominoes and sort them into 16 piles of four dominoes. They should be laid face-up on the table. Each player takes three piles of dominoes and looks at them. If they can make a match between their own dominoes and the dominoes lying face up on the table, they put their pairs together and make a stack of pairs in front of them. The player with the most points at the end wins. This game helps kindergartners to learn to count quickly and to recognize pairs.
Divide the kindergartners into groups of two, and give each group two sheets of paper, two pencils, and a set of 24 cube manipulatives. Tell the kindergartners that they are the teachers for this activity, and their job is to write three story problems for their partner to solve. They must write their story problem down using words, numbers, or pictures, and they can use their manipulatives to solve the problems. In China, kindergarten-age children write story problems to help them think more creatively when they solve math problems.