Chiense New Year

 I am not Chinese and a number of my students do not celebrate Chinese New Year.  I think it is important to discuss holidays that go under recognized in the united states. I also find many of the holidays that we normally do celebrate to be so far removed from were they originally came from that most people do not know where they originate from or why we celebrate them.I like to know these things.I enjoy learning about holidays. So I planned some activities for last week that revolved around Chinese New Year.This was for my before and after school program so we kept it short and sweet.

We made Chinese lanterns one day very similar to the ones we made for Halloween but all red now instead of orange.

We traced the template I used to make artist trading card sleeves to make lucky money envelopes and then we stamped them with rubber stamps on the outside.

I had done Chinese new years activities with me preschool students years before and  I remember how much they had loved this template on the crayola page for making their own parade puppet dragons.

The culminating event was a dragon parade. I still had the one I had made from years before. So I fixed him up a little I gave him some repairs (he is made out of paper after all) and I gave he face a fresh coat of paint. I reattached the body to the paper bag head and then spread him out on the cafe tables in the morning for the kids to add their own decoration to. We cut foam sheets into scales and added gold glitter glue to give it some sparkle. we added more strings to his side to "hide" the kids.We paraded around the school hallways in the morning wishing everyone a  "Happy Chinese New year!"