Happy Chiense New Year Have a great Year of The Dragon!

I love learning about this holiday with students...This year is the year of the dragon which makes it even better.

Chinese new year is a lunar holiday and is one week long this year it is Jan 20-27th.


I gave my  after school care students a packet on coloring sheets that I have compiled over the years on the topic of Chinese New Year and of dragons. We have also completed several projects about the theme.

Students made paper fortune cookies.. with circles of paper that we pinched and folded and adhered with a little bite of glue.

 We also created a drawing of paper lanterns lite up at night . I borrowed this idea from a blog I follow called
 Art Projects For Kids written by another art teacher. For her variation of this project she used oil pastels since we do not have those avialble at the after school program we used crayons and copy paper.
 

 

We also created red money envelopes that are used for Chinese New Year called om Pei. I gave the students xerox copies of Chinese coins to cut and put in to envelopes. Students started with a template for second grade students a gave them the option to either trace the template onto red construction paper  or use the xerox copy template I gave them directly. I also gave the students copies of  terms in Chinese calligraphy to let them  copy or cut an paste onto their envelopes.

template

step one draw picture on envelope front

step two flap under large flap then fold side flaps adhere with a glue stick

Other projects include a large collaborative parade dragon. I made this first in 2006 when I was a preschool teacher at a daycare studying this them with my students. I used a brown paper bag for the head of the dragon and used old manilla folders, a Styrofoam ball and tape for the nose and the mouth. Each year students add to the dragon gluing on extra scales and adding glitter, string of other shiny embellishments. Then on the Friday we will parade  it around the schools hallways.

 

 .


We also used two xerox copy templates to make our own parade puppets and dragon masks. The Crayola webpage has an excellent template that you can print and make copies of.

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!"