Learning Chinese

I am involved with a support group for families who have adopted children from China. We are eager for these children to learn Chinese and usually have a class on Chinese at our house. One of our teachers has been doing a type of mnemonic where he draws people representing an English word (or words) that sounds like the Chinese word. This has been very helpful for me. Example: Something like "mien bo" means "bread" in Chinese, so our teacher drew a picture of men bowing to help us remember. If anyone knows of any materials like this, we'd probably be interested.