Chinese Characters--look for the story

I’m teaching my daughter and her friend how to write Chinese characters as part of their weekly lesson (see my post from last week about our new Chinese language co-op).  Since they are also encountering new vocab and grammar patterns almost every week, I try to introduce only one or two new characters at a time.

Instead of forcing my daughter and her friend to copy the new characters hundreds of times (which was how I learned...and then promptly forgot), I look for creative ways to keep the characters fresh and alive in their minds.  One idea that I've been looking into lately is  imagining the character as part of a larger drawing and/or making up a story about that drawing. 

Illustrator, author, and graphic designer Christoph Niemann does this brilliantly in The Pet Dragon. He illustrates the meaning of Chinese characters by making them part of his illustrations for a story about a little girl named Lin Lin and the little dragon she receives as a gift. For some characters, Niemann employs the historical meaning of the pictograph (i.e. the character for “person” is meant to look like a walking person; Niemann draws this  character on top of a walking Lin).  But for others, Niemann creates his own interpretations of characters (i.e. the character fu, father, becomes Lin’s angry father’s eyebrows and moustache).  

Niemann is upfront with his intentions for this book—it is not to teach Chinese but to inspire kids to learn more. And that's what I loved about the book: it inspired me to look for the story, whether intentioned or unintended, in the characters. By asking my daughter and her friend to help create the story, this will help them remember the character—or at least that's my theory.  I'll let you know how it turns out!

How do you help kids remember Chinese characters?