The Great Race by Dawn Casey tells the story of the Chinese zodiac and how the animals came to be a part of the calendar.
The Warlord’s Puzzle by Virginia Walton Pilegard tells the tale of the origin of the Chinese tangram. We had tangrams- a parallelogram, a square, and five triangles to play with and use to make designs.
We also used the shapes for a collage.
We practiced using chopsticks with a sensory table full of pom poms (meat and veggies), yarn (noodles)and Chinese take-out boxes. We picked up the pom poms and yarn with chopsticks and placed them in the boxes.
Our table was set up with chopsticks and bowls like in a Chinese restaurant. We used the food from the sensory table to serve at the restaurant.
For lunch one day, we had Chinese noodles so that we could eat with chopsticks. We used them to eat cheese and oranges too! We did pretty well. All the practice paid off.
Several of the books we read were about the traditional lion dance, typical of Chinese New Year celebrations. The lion dance brings out the dancing dragon. One of our favorites was Lion Dancer: Ernie Wan’s Chinese New Year by Kate Waters.
We played a game called "Catch the Dragon’s Tail". We took turns wearing dragon tails and running as others tried to "catch" our tails.
We also read Dragon Dance: A Chinese New Year by Joan Holub and The Dancing Dragon by Marcia Vaughn.
We designed a dragon of a very own using our footprint as the head and handprints as the wings. We told stories about them.
Rice is a main staple in China. We had colored rice to play in- to pour, measure, sift and shake.
We read The Runaway Rice Cake (a Chinese rendition of "the Gingerbread Man") by Ying Chang Compestine and had rice cakes for snack.
Gung Hay Fat Choy!
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